David Lammy speaks at Morehouse College

During his Ministerial visit to Universities and Colleges in the USA, David stopped off at Morehouse College to deliver a speech on the subject of eqaulity in Higher Education.

"I’m very grateful to have this chance to meet you all today.

For someone from my background to stand here is an honour in itself because this college has been a symbol of achievement and aspiration for black people for a century and a half.

The great names that figure on the roll of Morehouse College alumni reflect all that has been achieved through this institution and I want no one here to be in any doubt just how much their example means to many thousands of black men, in whatever country they may be found.

The combination of a role model and an opportunity can be a powerful thing – and that is certainly something I recognise from my own experience.

My father left home when I was small, though that’s nothing unusual in Britain, where two-third of black children grow up with only one parent.


I was raised in what was a rough part of inner-city London, and that’s not unusual for black people either.

My childhood and youth coincided with a time of social unrest in London and other British cities. There was unemployment, deprivation, guns, gangs, drugs and occasionally full-scale riots. Policing was not always sensitive. Sometimes it seemed designed to provoke violence rather than defuse it.

It was against that backdrop I first heard the name and the message of the most famous of all this college’s distinguished alumni. It inspired me as it has people of all races and colours for the past 50 years.

And alongside that inspiration I was given the opportunities that have ultimately brought me here today to stand before you.

I was loved, encouraged and inspired by a mother who made enormous sacrifices after my father left home.

I was supported by church pastors who reinforced ideas of personal and social responsibility.

I was mentored by youth workers who believed in me and urged me to believe in myself.

I was invested in by teachers who chose to work in one of the poorest parts of London.

I was able to study at a great university, the School of Oriental and African Studies, in London.

And I had the privilege of studying at one of America’s other great Education Institutions, Harvard University.

Indeed it was at a Harvard alumni event where I would first meet an aspiring young senator with a rare mix of talent, ambition and integrity. I have stayed in touch with him and his family ever since. And I was deeply moved last year when I watched, with the rest of the world, as he was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States.

So as I stand here, as the minister responsible for Higher Education in Britain, talking to you in this historic place, I well understand how what goes on here each day can change lives.

And what my experience also teaches me is that schools, colleges, universities cannot do it all alone. My life reminds me that family and community have a vital role to play in shielding young people from the wider social forces that can come between them and the opportunities they deserve.

In my youth those forces were a toxic mixture of poverty, social unrest, low expectations and in some cases outright prejudice. In each of those areas Britain has made huge progress, tackling discrimination and reducing hardship.

But in this twenty-first century there are other social forces – in both Britain and the US – that have grown more influential and whose effects need to be guarded against.

Here I am talking about a consumer culture in which we have become used to having what we want, whenever we want. This, of course, is something we enjoy and benefit from each time we download a song we like straight to an i-phone or order a new gadget online seconds after we have seen the advert for it on TV. But in a world where successful study, a healthy diet or the prospect of savings all require people to delay gratification and think a little more long-term, there are downsides to the instantaneous culture we live in.

In the same way I am talking about the implications of an explosion in consumer choice in every aspect of our lives. In some ways, this vast expansion in consumer choices, with countless TV channels, radio stations, and sites on the web has opened up huge opportunities. Whole channels are now dedicated to news, current affairs, history, geography, the natural world. The opportunities for young people to widen their horizons grow day by day and are world away from the four terrestrial channels I grew up with, not all that long ago.





But when my constituents invite me into their homes to talk about local issues, so often there is only one channel playing on the TV set – MTV Base. Now don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against MTV Base. I even like some of the music it plays. But I wonder whether it can be healthy to see the same station playing in the morning before school, with the same music blaring from earphones on the way to school…and then the same channel back on again the moment the front door shuts again at the end of the day.

It’s a bit like CNN, which I know is based here in Atlanta. It’s an American brand that’s known the world over. Yet someone said to me that although you can see CNN in just about any hotel room anywhere, you never see CNN over here on the West Side. So that willingness for people to take responsibility for their own choices and to value education is even more important in the modern world when it’s easier to opt out.

And when I talk about these new social forces that we have to wrestle with as parents, politicians, educators, I also think of a grim materialism that the consumer revolution has brought with it. In popular culture it is often rappers who articulate this most openly and unashamedly, urging our young people to ‘get rich or die trying’. Sometimes criticised they are rightly criticised.

But the financial crisis that has gripped both of our countries for the last year reminds us that this mentality exists well beyond the confines of recording studios and hip pop albums. The same acceptance of privileging personal gain at all costs, ahead of hard work and endeavour, has been painfully evident in parts of the City of London and Wall Street in recent years.

All these social currents tell me something: that some of the wider forces that shape our young people’s values are not always reinforcing the messages we hope are coming from parents within the home or educators in schools.

So if we want more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to go to schools like Morehouse and succeed in the modern world, then parents need more help. Whether that means better advice, stronger support networks in their communities or more time to spend with their children in a culture of long working hours, we need families and communities that can help young people navigate the pressures of modern world.
 
It also tells me that issues that we are discussing today cannot be seen as the concern of one community alone. They are about national culture, character and values. So if the City of London and Wall Street want to benefit from all the talent that could be available to them, they need to start projecting a more socially responsible set of values and showing some moral leadership.

Because we cannot continue to see talent go to waste on such a chronic scale.

Even the most ruthless businessman would tell you that a company that succeeds is a company that makes the most of the talents of its employees.

Countries and their people are exactly the same. Every person that we leave unemployed or unfulfilled diminishes us all. It takes something away from our common good. All of our lives and our prospects are that much poorer because of it.

Condoning waste is just as bad for a society as it is for a business.

It’s a sad fact that, in your country and in mine, a disproportionate amount of that waste happens in minority ethnic communities. The black and Hispanic communities here and the black and Asian communities back in Britain.

For 150 years this college has fought against that waste of talent. At first, almost as a lone beacon of hope, but progressively and increasingly as part of a mainstream civic and political movement.

You students in the audience today will reap the benefits of studying at a great school – one of the top schools in the top higher education system in the world.

And it’s true that black people of talent in this country today have a better chance of self-fulfilment than at any time in its history.

But just as with Britain, there is still social and educational deprivation in this country, not just among the black and Hispanic communities, but also among poor white people. The effects of the recession have made those inequalities appear even more starkly.

So the effort to address inequality in education goes on. In this country, the multi-billion dollar education programme that President Obama announced earlier this year is another step along that path.

In Britain we have had a progressive government in power for over a decade now, impatient to equalise life chances.

Fifty years ago, fewer than 5 per cent of young people in Britain got the chance of a university education. They were predominantly white and predominantly the children of upper or middle-class parents.

Things have changed a lot since then.

Today, over 40 per cent of young British people go to university and there are also many more opportunities for older people to get a degree than there used to be.

Demand for higher education among young people is also at unprecedented levels. And this year, there will be more students going to university than ever before in Britain because the Government is funding more places than ever before.

That includes funding for living and study costs in the form of loans at favourable interest rates coupled with non-repayable grants for the least wealthy.

Our ultimate aim is to offer at least half of all young people the chance to go to university when they leave school or college.

But the availability of places to study and the means for people to support themselves financially while at university are only two of the obstacles to access.

I don’t believe that there’s a single university in Britain or America today that would turn down an application from someone just because they were black, or just because they went to a low-performing school, or because their father didn’t have a job.

So why is it that we still don’t have fair representation, especially in some of our most prestigious institutions?

Overall in Britain, young people from ethnic minority backgrounds are proportionately more likely to participate in higher education than young white people. That’s true of all individual ethnic groups except for people of black Caribbean and African origin.

One of the main causes of that seems to be that young black people, and especially black boys, tend to do less well at school.

So the causes of low participation in higher education start early. And it follows from this that the solutions to low participation must start early, ensuring that everyone gets a good experience of school.

In Britain, we’ve worked for more than a decade to bring the standard of our lowest-performing schools up to those of the best.

For example, we’ve adapted your successful Teach for America scheme to bring the brightest graduates into school teaching. And we recently launched a scheme of cash incentives to encourage the most effective teachers into the most challenging schools.

We’ve also tried to promote much stronger links between school education and higher education.

There are also a range of schemes at national and local levels to target groups – like black boys – who have tended to do less well than average at school. These include the National Black Boys Can Association and the Aspire programme, which has been backed by the Reverend Jesse Jackson, among others.

Our efforts have had a positive effect. The ten years between 1997 and 2007 brought double-digit rises in the numbers of both black Caribbean and black African school students achieving good grades in the GCSE exams that young people in England take at 16.

We’ve also recognized that exam grades in themselves are not an entirely satisfactory measure of potential, especially since they take no account of the distance that a student may have travelled, nor of the obstacles they may have had to overcome.

That’s one of the reasons why, in 2004, we created an Agency called the Office for Fair Access to negotiate agreements with universities on what they would do to widen participation.

But better schools and more enlightened university admissions policies won’t help to raise participation unless more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds actually apply for higher education.

This is another area where we’ve tried to take action. And in doing so, we’ve tried to recognize the importance of the role-models that surround a child as they’re growing up.

Positive role-models show young people what sort of adult life they can aspire to.

And the key word here is aspiration. Because if your father or mother is a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher, then it’s easy for you to imagine following in their footsteps. And it’s probably also fairly easy for you to find out what you need to do to achieve that. What sort of subjects you need to study and what sort of grades you need to work for.

It’s not the same if your parent or parents are in manual jobs or out of work, or if they have problems with drink or drugs.

It’s not the same if you’re growing up in a community if which virtually no one you know has had a higher education.

There’s no easy solution to this but one of the programmes of which I’m proudest is called Aimhigher. We launched it back in 2004 to help raise aspirations among children from less advantaged backgrounds. And it has already helped and supported thousands of them not just in applying for university, but also to apply successfully to the most highly-selective universities.

This programme works because it’s based on a very simple idea. It sends volunteer university students from less advantaged backgrounds back into schools which produce few university entrants to work with children and young people. The volunteers provide real-life examples of what it’s possible to achieve and direct contact for youngsters who may never even have considered going to university with people who can give them first-hand advice and encouragement.

Not so long ago, I launched an extension of the Aimhigher programme which will recruit around 5,500 more university students to mentor over 21,000 school pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds to help raise their educational aspirations.

So there are many ways in which government can play its part – and I know President Obama has announced a new $2.5 billion college completion fund to help ensure that people not only reach university but see through their studies too.

However, while I support and have fought for all of the initiatives that I have mentioned, there is another ingredient that success depends on: the determination of young people themselves to make the best of the chances they are given. It should be the job of government and wider society to level the playing field, but each of us has to value those opportunities enough to grasp them with both hands.

Since I entered public life, I’ve had the good fortune to visit many parts of the world and to see the different ways in which black communities in different countries seek to achieve in their own ways similar things to what you’re trying to achieve here.

I’ve seen for myself some of that great diaspora of black people that has spread out from Africa over the past 300 years or so.

And the more I exchange ideas and experiences with political figures from other countries, the more the same thought strikes me.

It’s very easy for people who’ve grown up expecting a good education to take it for granted. But until this generation, that has tended not to be the experience of black people in many places.

For example, when I go to Africa, I see the same thirst for education that carried the founders of so many independence movements abroad in their quest for knowledge – whether to Oxford and Harvard, or to Paris and Moscow. The same thirst takes young Africans to all parts of the globe today. Some of them had to walk miles every day as children just to get to elementary school. They’re not put off from travelling much further afield as adults to get the knowledge and skills needed to build their and their countries’ futures.

You see something similar in much of South America, and especially in Brazil.

It’s those attitudes that are making parts of Africa and South America into rising economic powers of the 21st century.

And it’s those attitudes that we in the developed world need to encourage if we want to withstand the growing challenges that globalisation brings.

So we must stand together as a community to address issues of disadvantage, but equally people must stand tall themselves and share that hunger for education and self-improvement that I have seen all around the world.

The final point I want to make today is about what happens after graduation. The Government and the education system can work hard to make progression from school and college to university as fair as it can be. And we can do everything we can to make sure everyone gets and even break during their studies. But that still leaves open the question of what happens after graduation, of whether we are prepared to tolerate glass ceilings when graduates go out and start their working lives.

The very top of most professions in Britain – like the judiciary, the public service, the armed forces and indeed, the political elite – is predominantly white, predominantly male and predominantly drawn from middle or upper-class backgrounds.

As a result, we remain short of the sorts of examples that black people in America can point to.

I’m thinking of examples like Thurgood Marshall and Leah Sears in the legal profession – the latter right here in Atlanta.

Or Colin Powell and William E Ward in the military.

Or indeed, Barack and Michelle Obama in the White House.

A major review of access to the professions in Britain reported recently and I know that most if not all of the professions themselves are willing to embrace change. Supporting and supplementing what they’re already doing to widen access and promote social mobility will be one of the Government’s most important tasks in the years ahead.

On both sides of the Atlantic, there’s much that remains to be done before we can call our higher education systems fully fair, fully free or fully equal. But from where I stand that’s all the more reason to work harder to achieve that goal.

I want to close by addressing a few words to the students who’ve come along today. It’s the same sort of thing I say regularly back home  at gatherings like this, or when I go on visits to colleges and universities, or just when I happen to get the chance to talk to young people from my own neighbourhood.

Remember that you’re special. That you’ve been singled out by virtue of your own achievements in getting here and by the opportunities in life that the fact of having been here will open up for you.

Consider the great figures from the past on whose shoulders you stand today.

Consider the hate, the prejudice and the indifference they struggled to overcome so that we of later generations would not have to suffer them.

Consider the struggles that are still going on by people like you in other parts of the wide black diaspora.

Consider the achievements of your predecessors – not just those, like Dr King, whose names will live forever, but also the thousands whose names are unknown to history but who played their part in bringing black men and women up from slavery.

You owe it to their memory to get everything you can from your college years.

After you leave here, you’ll owe it to the millions who never got the same start that Morehouse College has offered you.

And as you progress through life, I hope you’ll take the time whenever you can to extend a helping hand to those who might otherwise fall by the wayside.

Because in doing that, you’ll not only be true to the great ideals for which this college was established. You’ll also be helping to build a fairer, freer and more equal world.

And as you add your contribution to all that has gone before, you’ll carry my best wishes and my admiration with you.

Thank you."