James Law (Newcastle University)

It was not so very long ago that Prime Minister David Cameron was extolling the need to think about a person’s Life Chances. The idea as indicated above was originally attributed to the work of German sociologist Max Weber but was really given focus in Johnson and Kossykh 2008 review Early years, life chances and equality and Frank Field’s report The Foundation Years: preventing poor children becoming poor adults.

The story was that poverty was no longer the principal driver of social inequalities but that the opportunities an individual had and then took were key to improving the lot of more disadvantaged people in society. This seemed to be especially relevant for children whose life chances had been curtailed by virtue of circumstances completely outside their control. A Life Chances strategy was promised and due to be released at the time of the Brexit vote. It was postponed, Prime Minister Cameron resigned and, life chances, along with much of the Conservative party manifesto, appeared to be kicked into the proverbial long grass. The issues remained the same, of course, but the politics had changed.

Many were expecting the policy to resurface in time for the Tory Party conference but it did not and instead we had parliament bounced into a discussion about the expansion of grammar schools. This familiar political lightning rod meant people did not really have to discuss some of the key issues such as child poverty and its increase under the coalition government. Since then, the messages have stabilised and the emphasis is on a great meritocracy focusing on social justice and promoting opportunity and social mobility. Gone is the emphasis on the individual and their choices (good and bad) and in has come an emphasis on the role that the state needs to play in promoting social justice. These are all very laudable but without detail they smack of motherhood and apple pie.

One interesting change is the shift of emphasis from the most disadvantaged – those targeted in the poorly conceived Troubled Families initiative which appeared to have had so little effect – to the wide range of people who in the secretary of State of Education Justine Greening’s words are “just managing” – comparable perhaps to Ed Miliband’s “squeezed middle”. Opportunity Areas have been launched with £60 million of additional funding with an additional £75 million in a teaching and leadership innovation fund in the same areas. In practice of course, although deficit reduction is no longer the government’s mantra there are going to be substantial reductions in public spending generally and especially in areas which have benefited from social investment from the EU. So, while these figures are clearly welcome, they need to be off set against what is no longer available in other parts of the system.

We are now expecting a new strategy on these issues in the new year but it is pretty clear that it will not include reference to “life chances”. What will it include? Well, it looks as if inter- parental relationships will be key but it less clear whether there will be support for parenting programmes or indeed any programmes at all. It seems likely that the home learning environment (what parents do with their young children – taking them to the park, reading books etc) and the early years will become a focus for a broader agenda around social mobility and giving children opportunities early on in life.

In the end, of course, it is the political action rather than the words themselves which are critical. Nevertheless the concept that “life chances” was intended to capture remains important and the suspicion is that many of the key ideas in the original strategy will remain the same. It will be interesting to see if Field’s “life chance indicators” resurface to measure how good we are in narrowing the gap in the language and other skills of more and the less disadvantaged children which opens up well before children start attending school. Now that’s a difference in opportunity if ever there was one!