Equality of opportunity isn't about lowering expectations for education, it's about raising expectations for families

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Our social mobility is the worst in the Western world. The gap between the rich and poor has widened and become more ingrained.

But worse than this have been our politicians’ attempts to narrow the gap and engineer equality. Theirs is a history littered with failures, each entrenching inequality more deeply.

So it was with some foreboding that I read the pronouncements of the latest report on social mobility – from a cross party group of MPs.

Inequality: A poor child born in 1970 is less likely to have gone to university than one born in 1958, MPs say (file photo)

A poor child born in 1958 was more likely to have gone to university than a poor child born in 1970. This was but one of the facts from ‘Seven Truths about Social Mobility’ that didn’t surprise me.

Why has it got worse? Now that would be interesting. The MPs didn’t go there; they stayed glued to the statistics of inequality and poverty.

A report from the Sutton Trust Charity before Christmas said the much the same. The education gap between disadvantaged children and privileged children in the UK is greater than in virtually every other developed country.

This report pointed the finger of blame at schools. Schools ‘serving’ the poorest twenty per cent of children were the most inadequate. But the problem is more than one of  poor schools always having a disproportionate number of poor children in them, as the FT’s education correspondent Chris Cook has pointed out.

To add to the social reformers nightmare, Cook's recent analysis showed that poor children tend to do badly even when they go to good schools. His depressing conclusion  is that for poor children the majority of England's schools are pretty bad.

The fact is that since the doors of grammar schools were closed, so too was one good and reliable route to upward mobility. Despite Conservative MP Graham Brady's private sympathy for the grammar school mission - demonstrated at a House of Commons function recently attended by Michael Gove - they remain a political no no.

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It seems that MPs behind the latest report would rather turn their beady eyes on parents and the quality of parenting. This is on the basis of their assertion that 'a child’s development from zero to three is the point of greatest leverage for social mobility'. On what evidence I wonder do they say that? On the basis of adoption statistics? Surely not on Labour's Sure Start programme.

Where once it was education; now 'early intervention' is the Holy Grail for ironing out social differences and eliminating social disadvantage. Ummm.

Will it do any better? I doubt it.

Take every effort that has gone before. First, the comprehensive school revolution started under Labour but continued by Mrs Thatcher. It succeeded in levelling education down not up. Then there was the massive expansion in university education in the 1970s that was taken up by the already advantaged.

Finally Labour’s attempt to social engineer equality through pre-schooling and child care – a nationalisation of children - also proved an expensive failure. Every child did not matter. It did not improve their life chances.

In fact both the Sutton Trust Report and this recent report are a blow to all previous social engineering education interventions. They are blow to the manipulation of education in the quest of equality. More might have been achieved if education simply had the goal of educating.

Access for all: Professor Les Ebdon and Universities Minister David Willetts

But politicians just do not seem to get this. For it goes on.

At one end of the educational spectrum, Professor Les Ebdon is appointed by David Willetts to make universities discriminate in favour of the poor. Yet it will only lower university standards and make them and children less competitive globally. At the same time the DoE stops national academic awards for master’s degrees – essential graduate courses for which there are no student loans. And in one sweep it has closed the door to the best (moving up) job prospects for the brightest of our British graduates.

In the middle everyone is busy sponsoring new academies, though the best analysis suggests it will make little difference.

And at the other end MPs still strain at the leash to interfere with parenting from birth though vast sums of money have already been pumped in to no avail. ‘Deprived’ children in Sure Start areas turned out to do worse than their peers where there was no such project.

So can the state taking over parenting do any better?

If it is to rely on the current stock of poorly trained nursery care staff it is unlikely. One expert has gone on record as saying that ‘higher standards are demanded of people working with animals than of those left alone with a baby.’

The problem is that with all this mucking about MPs are skirting around the real ‘truth’ – the real cause of social stagnation.

It is called Single Parent Britain. It is this that differentiates Britain from all those other developed countries where there is more mobility. We have double the number of lone parents than the Netherlands for example. Our numbers are far higher than the rest of Europe.

But discussion of this is a political taboo. First rule - do not stigmatise.

Nor do politicians face the fact that it is their social policies that keep on putting more people on the wrong side of this social divide.

It is not that we do not need reading schemes, home start support and parenting classes for these benighted families. We do. But the truth politicians have to face is that the state will never have a large enough set of sticking plasters to make up for the fifth of children living with a lone mother. Nor are the Treasury' s coffers big enough to support this questionable lifestyle luxury.

In 1986 mothers with no partners made up just 14 per cent of parents. Today they make up 24 per cent – that's nearly a quarter of all families. 30% of children live away from their natural father. One in five children in our country have gained or lost a ‘parent’ in the first seven years of their life – far more likely if their natural parents had cohabited, not married. This is not a good emotional start in life.

Allowing this to happen is the main cause of inequality and deprivation. It continues because of, not despite, politicians. While they fiddle Rome burns.

These family set ups are not all equally viable – or equally kind to children however valiant the efforts of individual parents. So why has it taken a high court family judge, Sir Paul Coleridge, not a politician, to point out what such adult lifestyle choices are doing to children; to the huge collateral damage?

The buck stops with politicians. They are responsible for the law as well as for the tax and welfare system that encourages ‘anything goes’ families. They stand behind the ‘tax credits’ system (glorified welfare handouts) that gives unconditional economic support to lone parenthood and which direct their children to inadequate childcare.

These policies are the reason why so many children continue to be born into this ‘transient shack up’ world.

Politicians busy themselves with ever earlier intervention initiatives, yet schools already spend hours, days and weeks on children who do not even know their own name; on trying to teach parents and their children basic social skills.

Damian Hinds, the MP author of the report, is right. Britain’s growing social immobility harms social justice and economic growth. But he has yet to face up ‘to the really difficult aspects of this challenge’; that this is about more than the platitudes of 'a shared commitment between schools, universities and firms, government and the voluntary sector'.

It means being honest. It means, as Frank Field said, to think the unthinkable; that unconditional welfare support for lone motherhood has to be discontinued. It means politicians getting behind rewarding stable family set ups through the tax and benefits system.

These, after all, are the policies other more socially mobile countries have held onto – unlike us. Only by adopting them will politicians get out of the way of us moving on up.