{"id":329224,"date":"2025-12-22T04:40:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-22T04:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/329224\/"},"modified":"2025-12-22T04:40:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-22T04:40:08","slug":"starmer-lacks-coherent-social-mobility-plan-top-government-adviser-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/329224\/","title":{"rendered":"Starmer lacks coherent social mobility plan, top government adviser says"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;But what we don&#8217;t have is a coherent approach to social mobility as a useful concept that you can build a strategy around.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">While praising individual policies on housing and skills, he said other proposals had been &#8220;stop-start&#8221;, while almost one million young people are now outside education, work or training.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;We&#8217;ve got other policies like growth, educational improvement where we&#8217;re just not sure where we&#8217;re going,&#8221; Francis said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Without an overall strategy, he said, the government would &#8220;struggle to address some of those issues and have a clear-headed view about what we might do to improve things&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Among the conclusions of week&#8217;s report were that a child&#8217;s family background still heavily shapes their education level and future life chances in the UK. It also said there were &#8220;extreme regional disparities&#8221; within the country. <\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">A government spokesperson called the number of young people outside education, work or training a crisis that couldn&#8217;t be ignored and said a review by Alan Milburn would help build a system that ensured every young person had an opportunity to make something of their lives.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The report listed North East of England, Yorkshire and the Humber, and the West Midlands as facing &#8220;enduring disadvantages&#8221;, while former mining areas in Wales and Scotland are also &#8220;notably disadvantaged&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">However, new areas outside London with &#8220;favourable conditions for innovation and growth&#8221; include Aberdeen, Brighton, Bristol, Chester, Edinburgh, Oxfordshire, Reading and West Berkshire, the report said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">It also noted that almost half of young people aged 25 to 29 years were in professional occupations between 2022 and 2024 &#8211; up from 36% between 2014 and 2016.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">But people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds &#8220;don&#8217;t benefit as much from these opportunities as their peers&#8221;, it said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"&#8220;But what we don&#8217;t have is a coherent approach to social mobility as a useful concept that you&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":329225,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-329224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329224\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/329225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}