Michael Kelly: Slow-going along road to universal education

With many leaving school illiterate, all parties have work to do if learning is to become the means to social betterment

MAYBE it is because my roots are in Blantyre that I'm acutely aware of the importance of education in assisting social mobility. Brought up on tales of the 10-year-old David Livingstone working a ten-hour day in the cotton mill before taking advantage of the education the owner was forced to offer, who could not admire the tenacity and commitment by which he dragged himself out of the labouring masses?

Spare a thought, however, for the hundreds of other children who were too exhausted or sick to push themselves any further and who ended up simply producing more slave labour for the mill owner. Studying the 19th century through successive Factory Acts - a fight to limit the overwhelming power that capital had against labour - forces all but the least compassionate to espouse the left-wing view that change must be forced upon society if individuals are to be free and fulfilled. A free enterprise society won't do it for you. All you get is a more efficient economic man. Livingstone's story is of a man overcoming the destiny that his birth dictated by fighting disadvantage with exceptional personal characteristics.

Every attempt to improve the conditions of workers has been opposed by "business" on the grounds of cost. They're even moaning about the royal wedding day holiday. And every time "business" has been proved wrong as the economy continues to grow. Since the beginning of the nineteen century entrepreneurs have fought against statutory regulation of their right to exploit workers. Even the New Lanark pioneer David Dales of this world wanted to enforce their views of betterment on workers who had no choice. That's the danger of creating an enterprise society. It would be a society of obsessive and driven people who work beyond success and wealth for the sake of work and who cannot understand why those they employ prefer more leisure to enjoy the finer things of life.

The progress of education and social mobility has been slow. It has been a history of catch-up rather than of bold anticipatory steps. It took 99 years from the first Factory Act in 1802 for the employment of children under 12 to be banned. Equally the UK was slow to introduce compulsory education. It has taken well over a hundred years to fix the school leaving age at 16 with plans to raise it in 2013 to 17 and in 2015 to 18 - essential in a world where advanced education will be the key to survival against emerging economies.

Except that the Scottish Tories disagree. In a proposal worthy of their 19th century predecessors they announced plans to allow children to leave school at 14 if they have an apprenticeship to go to. It sums up the whole philosophic approach which they have been trying to hide.Clearly education for them is simply to prepare the prols for work. Stick 'em in a trade and we'll have plenty of trained workers competing for so few jobs that it will keep wages down. It's a logical part of their policy to cut the public sector and place the work in the hands of their business backers. Those backers need cheap labour if they are to deliver at costs below those in the public sector. It is also a natural successor to their opposition to the abolition of the qualification examination that deprived so many 11-year-olds to an academic education.

Keeping uninterested and unwilling children at school has, of course, been a growing problem as the leaving age has been increased. But it is an admission of cynical despair after decades of social policy building education to promise reduce it in a manifesto entitled "Common Sense for Scotland." "Back to the Future" more like. Educators have failed by not ensuring that children benefit from their latter years at school. That is where the reform is needed.

The Lib Dems see improved social mobility coming through improving post-education opportunities for the less well connected. Balancing the middle class advantage of networks by allocating internships through competition has its merits. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg has been unfairly criticised for taking advantage of these opportunities when he was young. But it has put him in a better position to judge the inequality of it. It is a policy, however, based on seeing young people as economic units rather than rounded human beings. And if competition works in this area how much more effective would it be if public schools had to select their pupils without using class, privilege and inheritance?

Labour's philosophy of educating the whole person to develop the full untapped human potential has always been the one that attracted me. Not that the party, my party, either at Westminster or Holyrood ever delivered effectively enough on these grand aspirations. Good intentions on their own may simply pave the way to hell. But no highway to progress can be built without the right intention. You just need the budget to fill in the inevitable potholes caused by wintry economic conditions - and a sense of priority that was missing from the last Labour UK governments.

However thing have got worse in Scotland since the Tories here decided to put and keep Alex Salmond in power. Youth unemployment has grown by 220 per cent in last two years under him. Worse, the Literacy Commission reports that one in five leave school functionally illiterate - can't imagine them surviving an electrician's apprenticeship. Yet despite the highest budgets ever the SNP has cut 3,000 teachers and 1,000 classroom assistants.

Labour's promise of an education literacy programme to put up to 1000 teachers into Scottish schools in a long-overdue drive eradicate illiteracy must surely be the right place to begin the next phase of increasing social mobility.But the fact that we struggle with illiteracy as a barrier to social mobility shows how little progress has been made. And a reading programme is a very long way from producing the necessary blitz on the economic and social inequalities that still mark a society well into its third century of industrialisation.