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While the struggling Conservative party gathers in its conference city for its yearly gathering, it has plenty to consider regarding its next steps. It’s not even clear if a road forward remains open. We are in challenging circumstances for a political party that now has almost nothing, if anything, fresh or distinctive to say to the electorate.

The Missed Opportunity

Things could have turned out vastly better if concrete steps had been made on an priority that matters to people throughout the UK: Levelling up. However the former leadership lacked the slightest idea on how to transform his zeitgeisty rhetoric on levelling up into actual implementation. During the initial period after the 2019 election, it debated what the phrase even meant.

It seemed strange to me, because I’d already told Johnson what social mobility signified when we initially discussed about it during his leadership campaign. The expression was language I created and used at the Department for Education to talk about equal opportunity. It served as our guiding principle, and its definition is unambiguous: social mobility is the means by which we achieve equality of opportunity – not by taking prospects away from those who are already advantaged, but rather by expanding options to those that are without.

The Core Concept

Another crucial education department term we used, “potential is equally shared throughout the nation, however access isn’t”, served as a deliberate expression, reflecting the two halves of a equal opportunity plan. First, ability distributed uniformly but not cultivated evenly through our schools and colleges. Second, chances not distributed fairly by employers or our economy. Thus, schools and companies were crucial to achieving improved equality of opportunity. This constituted an priority about the community framework of our country – supporting people’s potential and connecting them to chances.

The Reality of Implementation

How did the social mobility agenda turn into under the Tory administration? Regional development money administered out of the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. Decorative floral displays and reconfigured roundabouts and roads. A government strategy was launched nearly three years after the Prime Minister took office, which saw ongoing initiatives rebadged under the fresh social mobility slogan.

As a result, a broader social mobility agenda went unpursued, as well as all the improvement that it may have generated – in funding, business, financial planning, taxation and in local regeneration. Additionally, in learning, including a tertiary education that has become a scapegoat for elected officials – despite the fact that it remains the primary vehicle of life improvement for youth from modest backgrounds, including myself, this country has had over the past 30 years. Possibly the sole mechanism of equal opportunity, operating at scale.

The Role of Ambition

Hope is essential for our country to thrive. For people to have aspiration, there needs to be a realistic expectation that effort and reward are related; that if people aspire, they can attain. For any government, being able to create a outlook of positivity about the years ahead is critical. Studies by the Institute for Policy Research at the university and others, recently released, showed that the DfE’s 12 “opportunity areas” I introduced as education secretary – place-based approaches to improving education outcomes – led to students in those areas being up to nearly one-fifth more hopeful about their life ahead than those in comparable communities without these initiatives in place. The evidence is clear: just making an sincere effort on pro-social mobility policy can rapidly and effectively change how people feel about their prospects.

Lost Potential

Oblivious to this, and in the middle of its post-Johnson leadership contest, in autumn 2022, the ruling party ended the initiatives. Why would anyone in those communities vote for a organization that made that decision? The opportunity areas policy is a clear case of what might have become a revolutionary administration strategy on social mobility, but that possibility was totally misused. Methods such as this can generate optimism and ambition. In contrast, as the ruling party found out, breaking the promise of equal opportunity is the biggest blunder any leadership can make. Voters held accountable the government for its incompetence but, perhaps most of all, for its failed pledges on equal opportunity.

Present Circumstances

Currently the baton on social mobility and equality of opportunity has been taken up by a new administration. The previous terminology has been cast off. The current administration has its own political rhetoric of “removing obstacles to success”. The party that is increasingly displacing the struggling Conservative party, the challenger, also has its own message – “reindustrialisation”. It’s a phrase to talk about fresh prospects in communities like the one I come from, in the region. It suggests that an historical manufacturing base can be reborn into an revitalized economy.

To the electorate, it must seem like a repetitive cycle. Similar challenge, alternative phrasing. Yet, currently, little improvement.

Lessons for the Future

Should the current and alternative parties want to escape the same fate, each group should understand the previous government’s errors on social mobility; that social mobility rhetoric is easy to say, but successful delivery of fairer outcomes is much harder. The UK’s persistently low life chances remains the primary challenge for our country, with youth unable to get a good job beginning, those working hard in occupations with little to show after the rent has been paid, and citizens throughout the UK without any real hope their offspring will be able to do improve in life than they have.

Politicians can talk about improved access as much as they want. However, which party has the organization that has the comprehensive policy agenda on social mobility? None appear to exist. Whoever gets there first, wins. Not only for their party, but, more importantly, for a whole country that has never needed fair chances so badly.