We all want to live in a fair society. But what should that mean – and how could we get there? I propose that our core fairness test could be this: that we should not inherit our life chances at birth. In Britain today, where we are born and who our parents are still matters far too much in determining our opportunities and outcomes in life. And so our own choices, talents and aspirations count for too little.

We all want to live in a fair society. But what should that mean – and how could we get there?

I propose that our core fairness test could be this: that we should not inherit our life chances at birth.

In Britain today, where we are born and who our parents are still matters far too much in determining our opportunities and outcomes in life. And so our own choices, talents and aspirations count for too little.

The vision of a free and fair society would be one which extends to us all the autonomy to author our own life stories - challenging the extent to which this is determined by forces beyond our control.

This 'fight against fate' – breaking the cycle of disadvantage to make life chances more equal – could provide the lodestar to guide future action and campaigns for equality.

Firstly, I want to show how this goal of more equal life chances could bring greater clarity to the important – but often rather confused – debate about social mobility in Britain.

Secondly, I want to look at how this could inform a deeper policy agenda to challenge educational inequality.

Myths about social mobility

Growing public and political concern about social mobility is good news. But the social mobility debate is rather confused. We need to beware some key myths and misunderstandings which would take us down the wrong path.

Perhaps the most popular myth is the idea that 'social mobility has stalled under Labour since 1997'. I have lost count of how often that gets asserted on the Today Programme or in Parliament. Many people now take this as the starting point for discussion.

But this is just plain wrong. There is no hard evidence - either way - about the impact of the last ten years on social mobility. If we understand what social mobility is measuring, we can easily see why it is too soon to judge.

The influential LSE research study behind the headlines on stalled social mobility found mobility was lower for those born in 1970 than 1958.

We can not learn anything about the impact of policy since 1997 by comparing those who entered the labour market in the mid-1970s with those who were sixteen in 1986.

Next year, the 1997 birth cohort will enter secondary school while those who were seven in 1997 will reach the age of eighteen.

As Tony Giddens has said: "It takes a minimum of 30 years to measure how socially mobile someone is, because we are comparing the jobs people are in today with those of their parents". Can you imagine anything more frustrating? Try telling the newspaper editor needing to sum it up in a headline tomorrow that she will have to wait 30 years to report the facts on social mobility today.

The tendency to miss this point becomes a more dangerous mistake because of how the argument often develops. 'Nobody doubts that Labour has tried', even critical newspaper columnists and opposition spokesman will concede. 'But it hasn't worked. Now for something completely different'. There is often a sharply ideological element to this: 'This government thought that state action and public investment could make a difference on inequality. So now we have the proof that the state must fail. But that ideologically driven argument does not have the evidence base it claims.

Being unable to measure social mobility in real time does not prevent an effective equality agenda. Why gaze in the crystal ball when the overseas evidence offers important signposts about the factor which enable and impede mobility? We need to understand why Britain and the US have much lower mobility than Germany or the Nordic countries, and which key issues – levels of economic inequality, investment in early years support, the educational attainment of disadvantaged groups – are most likely to impact on mobility and opportunity.

Beyond social mobility

But even if we have an accurate understanding of social mobility, we need a deeper agenda for more equal life chances.

Stalled mobility is an important symptom – a warning signal that the forces of fate are strengthening their grip. But that does not mean that 'as much social mobility as possible' should be our goal. Maximum churn is not the measure of the good society.

Naturally, it is upward mobility which is popular with politicians. The anxieties of downward mobility find fewer champions. This helps to explain why many proposals to 'kick-start social mobility' which often have a sharp focus on how to offer an 'escape route' so that the very brightest children from poor backgrounds can avoid the fate of their friends. But this is too narrow if it leaves the unfair broader distribution of opportunities and rewards unchanged. We should create broad highways of advancement, not narrow ladders of opportunity, as the Fabian Life Chances Commission argued last year.

Another common concept, 'meritocracy', was originally intended to be a warning by its inventor, Michael Young. Even so, a true meritocracy, whatever its faults, would mark progress from where we are today. But we should remember that the worst of all worlds is to have a deeply class structured and stratified society which believes itself to be meritocratic. Britain should not seek to emulate the United States, where a belief in the American Dream cannot hide the lowest social mobility in the OECD. The idea of meritocracy is naturally popular with winners – but if It leads those at the top to believe that they deserve whatever they can get then there are dangers for social cohesion and social responsibility.

Nevertheless, meritocracy's demands are rather more radical than many seem to realize. Those of us who want to go further can make much common cause with meritocrats. Perhaps those who use the language of equal opportunity in an easy, consequence-free way could be more robustly challenged more often. Is equal opportunity talk combined with an acknowledgement of how unequal opportunity remains in Britain today? Even better, is a serious agenda to break down the barriers to opportunity being proposed?

Narrowing the gap in education

I want to look briefly at what such an agenda might look like in education.

Education has the potential to be the most powerful force in challenging social disadvantage – but it can also play the decisive role in entrenching and reinforcing existing patterns of inequality.

The current evidence shows both forces at work. Stark attainment gaps are strongly correlated with poverty, gender, ethnicity and disability.

There have been important moves to break the cycle of disadvantage. If there was one piece of evidence which convinced Ministers of the importance of early years, it was Leon Feinstein's finding of how children from poor backgrounds who are high achievers at 22 months get overtaken before school age by less bright children from affluent backgrounds.

Patterns of educational attainment across different ethnic groups offer the clearest example of why effective equality strategies must now reflect and learn from the complex reality, as the new Equality and Human Rights Commission is doing, rather than outdated thinking which seeks to compare 'ethnic minority' performance to that of the majority.

A life chances approach would have a particular focus on those who risk being left behind in education, notably children from Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds, and Afro-Caribbean and white working-class boys in particular.

Class plays a particularly strong role. In 2002, more than twice the proportion of children with professional parents got 5 or more GCSEs at A-C (77%) than children with parents in routine manual occupations (32 per cent). But even this marks significant progress on the position in 1992, when the gap was four times as great – 60 per cent versus 16 per cent.

We should also be learning from those who are confounding what the socio-economic data would predict: Why pupils of Chinese origin on free school meals do so well at GCSE compared to others? How pupils of Bangladeshi origin though they still achieve worse results than any other ethnic group have had the fastest improving results of any group over the last ten years.

Educational inequality: next decade challenges

There has been much progress on educational attainment over the last decade. The core challenge for the next decade is to continue to raise average attainment – but with a much sharper focus on narrowing attainment gaps.

The Comprehensive Spending Review adopted the central education recommendation of the Fabian Life Chances Commission – a new Public Services Agreement target to reduce inequalities in educational attainment.

Achieving this will depend on deepening the current agenda – within and beyond the education system.

1. Ending child poverty

Ending child poverty should be the number one priority for tackling the cycle of educational disadvantage as well as for a more equal life chances agenda across the piece.

The good news is that each of the three major parties are now signed up to the goal of ending child poverty by 2020. The bad news is that none of them has policies which can achieve this – or even to make significant further progress towards the goal possible. So we are some way from having a real consensus to end child poverty which is fit for purpose.

Campaigners should keep up the pressure on government and the other parties. But we also need to make this a public issue. No other single issue will have more impact on tackling disadvantage in BME communities. But neither the End Child Poverty coalition itself - nor the priorities of leading black British, British Asian and British Muslim opinion formers and campaigning groups currently reflect this.

2, Get family policy right

The creation of the new Department for Children, Schools and Families offers a great opportunity to fuse the agenda for schools and the wider social factors, as the new Children's Plan shows.

Perhaps its most difficult challenge will be to get family policy right. It is a very sensitive area but it will be important to win public support for a deeper agenda. Breaking the cycle of disadvantage depends on understanding the crucial role of the family as a social as well as private institution. How to improve the home learning environment – with the focus on practical, supportive steps - could become as important an agenda in the next decade as the early years was in the last. This will require more parenting support, more support to help parents reconcile their work and caring duties – particularly childcare – and to improve the quality of parental relationships

3. Target increased resources on disadvantage

The government should begin to timetable its aspiration that spending per pupil in state schools should match that in private schools, by making this a centrepiece of a further Comprehensive Spending Review in 2009, to set broad spending priorities across the next Parliament.

Of course,it is not only resources that matter. But they make a difference in the private sector and can also play an important part in a national mission to produce a world class state school system. There is potential here not only for a cross-party consensus on the overall objective - but also, more challengingly, on the specific measures to move towards it.

Narrowing the attainment gap depends on all parties committing to focus future increases in resources on disadvantage, so that a continuing goal of improved standards for all can be combined with a strong focus on reducing inequalities over time. We need a public debate to explore the evidence about which measures could make most difference – for example, fair admissions, investing in school leadership, in smaller class sizes and incentives for the best graduates to teach in areas of most need

4. Start a rational debate about the impact of private education

The pattern of private education in the UK is one of the distinctive features contributing to low levels of mobility. While it is easy for this to become a highly emotive, polarised debate, it should also be possible to have a cool and rational debate about the evidence, including the proportion of places at Russell Group universities which go to students from private schools.

Even in the absence of significant public debate on this issue, public attitudes show a nuanced concern about the impact. The YouGov/Fabian Equality poll showed that a clear majority of the public are worried about the impact of private education on fair chances: 38% oppose the principle of private education outright, because it will lead to unfair advantages and a further 25% believe that while parents should have the right to private education, government should ensure their children do not gain unfair advantages. (Only 29% believe private education is an important right for those who can afford it, without any concern about fairness). By contrast, 69% believe the principle of private health and a high quality NHS for all can go together– perhaps reflecting that education is a positional good in a way that health is not.

While many in the private education sector has traditionally taken a very defensive stance here, some recognise that it is in their own enlightened self-interest respond to these concerns. That has thrown up a range of proposals of a philanthropic nature, such as the sharing of resources with state schools. There is a serious policy and political discussion about what the threshold of public benefit should be, which the Charity Commission is currently looking at.

More radical ideas could be put on the agenda too. Putting VAT on private school fees could finance an opportunity fund to tackle educational disadvantage. It is unlikely that the government would adopt that. But this should be a subject for debate in the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties. Or in all parties. (You never know when a Tory moderniser might want a bold eye-catching way to surprise us all!). Indeed, the Fabian/YouGov poll shows that 49% of the public support this proposal before any public argument has been made.

Conclusion: the political challenge

Above all, we must stay the course and deepen our efforts. The most important message is that breaking the cycle of disadvantage across generations can not be done without a sustained project for more than one political generation too.

(The fundamental unfairness in life chances comes in matters of life and death. Take the tube outside and life expectancy falls by one year for every stop you take east on the Jubilee Line to Canning Town. This should shock us into urgent and deep action. Yet if we took every step we could, it is in the nature of life expectancy that we would expect significant results across five parliaments, not a five year term).

In a democratic society, finding the compelling public argument for equality and building the coalition to make it possible matters just as much as having the right philosophical account of equality and policies which can narrow the gaps in life chances.

To make enough progress, and protect it being reversed, we will need a 21st century public settlement on equality just as deeply embedded as that which underpins the NHS today.

How we do that will be the focus of a major new Fabian Society and Webb Memorial Trust project over the next two years, marking the centenary of the 1909 Minority Report on Poor Law reform, which first began an important public argument about our collective responsibility for tackling poverty and inequality.

There is a challenge to each of the major parties.

Labour has put these issues back into the political mainstream. It has been strong on policy – particularly on the early years, and now on extending educational opoportunity. But it has been weaker on shifting public arguments to make further progress possible. The challenge must now be to show that it has not reached the limits of progress by going public to mobilize the support and resources for a deeper agenda.

The emergence of the language of social justice in Conservative politics could mark an important shift. On one level, the party has shifted a long way. Twenty years after Cabinet Ministers declared that there was no poverty in Britain, the party accepts that poverty is relative and has signed up to an aspiration to reduce income inequality by signing up to the idea of ending child poverty.

Yet Conservative social justice thinking has significant gaps. The emphasis is very heavily on individual causes, without any significant analysis of structural factors. Family breakdown – like addiction and debt – are identified as important causes of poverty; but what is missing is any understanding of poverty as a potential cause of family breakdown, or addiction or debt. So both right and left will need to dig deeper to combine an analysis of behavioural and structural factors. We have not yet heard a convincing Conservative account about how we got here in the 1980s, or why the UK and the US are at the bottom of the international mobility league and the Nordic countries at the top.

The Liberal Democrats talked about inequality at the last election. But their policy agenda failed the redistribution test – more often targeting the middle rather than the bottom. The challenge for the new leader will be to have a deeper agenda for equal life chances, and showing whether and how the party will seek to equality-proof its localism agenda.

Over the next two years, each of the parties will use the language of social justice. This offers an important opportunity to challenge each of them to develop the deeper equality agenda we need to tackle the cycle of disadvantage.

• Sunder Katwala, General Secretary of the Fabian Society, was speaking at 'Diverse Britain 2007: Promoting Race Equality' held by The Guardian and the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Tuesday 11th December at the QEII Conference Centre, London.

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