John Veit-Wilson (Newcastle University)

Talking about life chances in the UK at present inevitably also means talking about the consequences of inequality and poverty and the possibilities of social mobility. There’s a lot to be said, and naturally scholars want to say it all, or as much of it as they’ve themselves grasped. Whether or not that makes for lively academic and professional conferences, it’s no use when snappy concision is what’s needed for public and media impact. When I was asked to comment at the end of the recent event Setting a course for life chances: a new direction, it seemed to me that  instead of summaries or key points something which did have to be said was what had not been mentioned by other speakers. This isn’t a matter of proverbial unmentionable elephants but of ghost subjects which haunt all these discussions and which everyone’s a bit frightened of. Three of them floated around and need confrontation.

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On 12^th September our first event about life chances took place on the university campus, to discuss the potential opportunity from the life chances agenda. The participants included nearly 50 people from universities, local government and other organisations in the region, as well as colleagues already part of the project. The aim was to identify where we thought there was opportunity to do something new with the agenda and how best to proceed by engaging with other interested groups.

We were pleased to have an introduction from Mark Shucksmith, the Director of Newcastle University’s Institute for Social Renewal (NISR) which has sponsored the project and the cost of the event itself. Mark identified that he had used Max Weber’s original theory about life chances in his thesis several decades earlier, and that this had been contesting Marx’s solely structural interpretation of society. While the term has been appropriated by others now, the original theoretical development has something to offer still, and there is a geographical aspect to structural factors for life chances in rural populations.

The principal feature of the afternoon was a presentation from Moussa Haddad, one of the policy officers of the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG). Moussa outlined how the life chances agenda related to the work on poverty CPAG is renowned for, and how this affected many different areas of children’s lives. A fuller description of Moussa’s talk, and the slides from his presentation, will feature as a future blog, but the political story is still evolving. And CPAG will be launching a book in October which includes chapters on each of the different themes, from such luminaries as Michael Marmot who wrote the health chapter, and Alan Milburn who writes about social mobility.

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