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While the struggling Conservative party meets in its conference city for its yearly gathering, it has much to ponder regarding its path forward. It’s not even clear if a road forward remains open. We are in difficult days for a governing group that now has very little, if anything, new or unique to say to the public.

The Missed Opportunity

The situation might have been so different if concrete steps had been made on an agenda that resonates with people nationwide: Levelling up. Yet Boris Johnson’s government did not possess the slightest idea on how to convert the trendy talk on levelling up into policy reality. For the two years after the 2019 election, it debated what the phrase actually signified.

It seemed strange to me, because I had clearly defined for the Prime Minister what social mobility entailed when we first spoke about it during the contest for party leader. The phrase was a concept I originated and used at the Department for Education to talk about social mobility. It served as our guiding principle, and its purpose is straightforward: social mobility is the method by which we achieve fair chances – not by taking opportunity away from those who are already advantaged, but rather by expanding chances to those that don’t.

The Core Concept

Another crucial education department term we used, “ability is distributed uniformly throughout the nation, yet chances are not”, again was a intentional wording, reflecting the two parts of a social mobility strategy. First, potential shared equally but not developed consistently through our schools and colleges. Furthermore, opportunities not spread evenly by businesses or our economy. Therefore, schools and companies were crucial to achieving stronger social mobility. This represented an priority about the social fabric of our country – investing in human talent and providing access to opportunities.

What Levelling Up Became

What did the social mobility agenda evolve into under the previous government? Regional development money overseen from the the relevant ministry. Decorative floral displays and reconfigured roundabouts and roads. A white paper was launched nearly three years after the Prime Minister took office, which saw existing policy approaches repackaged under the recently branded agenda.

Therefore, a wider fairness strategy went unpursued, as well as all the reform that it could have inspired – in funding, commerce, financial planning, tax and in place-making. Moreover, in education, including a university system that has become a target for politicians of all stripes – despite the fact that it remains the most powerful engine of social mobility for individuals from less privileged homes, including myself, this country has had over the past 30 years. Maybe the primary source of social mobility, operating at scale.

The Role of Ambition

Hope is essential for our country to succeed. To foster ambition, there needs to be a believable feeling that effort and reward are related; that if people aspire, they can achieve. For all administrations, being able to foster a outlook of positivity about the years ahead is important. Research by the academic institution at the university and others, published last month, showed that the DfE’s 12 “opportunity areas” I launched while in office – community-focused methods to enhancing learning results – led to students in those neighborhoods being up to nearly one-fifth more optimistic about their prospects than those in comparable communities without these programmes in place. The evidence is clear: just making an genuine beginning on fair opportunity strategies can rapidly and effectively change how people view their prospects.

Lost Potential

Unaware of these findings, and in the midst of its successor selection process, in September 2022, the Tory administration terminated the programmes. Why should any person in those regions vote for a political group that made that decision? This specific initiative is a clear case of what might have become a revolutionary administration strategy on levelling up, but that possibility was totally misused. Methods such as this can generate optimism and ambition. Conversely, as the ruling party learned, breaking the promise of equal opportunity is the most expensive error any government can make. Voters penalized the leadership for its incompetence but, primarily, for its broken promises on levelling up.

Present Circumstances

Now the baton on social mobility and fair access has passed to a opposition party. The old slogan has been abandoned. The current administration has its own public messaging of “eliminating hurdles to advancement”. The party that is steadily supplanting the hapless Conservative party, Reform UK, also has its own message – “reindustrialisation”. It’s a phrase to talk about new opportunities in regions like the one I come from, in the region. It promises that an industrial past can be reborn into an modern manufacturing sector.

For the public, it must seem like a déjà vu experience. Similar challenge, alternative phrasing. Yet, currently, little improvement.

The Way Forward

Whether the government and opposition want to avoid the same fate, each group should learn from the Conservatives’ failure on levelling up; that social mobility rhetoric is one thing, but successful delivery of more equal results is far more challenging. Our nation’s chronically poor social mobility remains the key issue for our country, with the next generation unable to get a decent career start, those laboring in full-time jobs with little to show after the rent has been paid, and individuals nationwide without any actual expectation their next generation will be able to do improve in life than they have.

Politicians can mention improved access repeatedly. Yet where is the party that has the comprehensive policy agenda on equal opportunity? I observe no such party. The first to achieve this, succeeds. Not only for themselves, but, crucially, for a entire nation that has never needed equality of opportunity so badly.