Despite the best efforts of successive UK governments, organisations and businesses to improve social mobility, the impact of many of their policies and interventions remains frustratingly limited. The reasons for this are complex, but one thing is clear: we need to rethink how we approach social mobility.
Traditional approaches typically focus on the university pathway, attempting to support young people from less well-off backgrounds to get a degree and move into professional roles.
The approach has had some success, and while that’s great for those involved. However, we must also recognise that with less than 50 per cent of 18- to 20-year-olds studying for degree-level qualifications in 2022, and nearly one in five adults having no qualifications at all, this approach is not always relevant for many young people today.
The focus on these ‘lucky few’ runs the risk of wasting or under-developing the potential of large swathes of the population who do not follow traditional pathways to success or who live in places where opportunity is limited.
Our biggest social mobility challenge is not to obsess about the social mix within elite groups, but to create a wider range of good-quality opportunities for a wider range of people in a wider range of places.
This is a problem of supply as well as demand, in terms the volume of good jobs and of their distribution across the country.
The social mobility commission’s latest report, Innovation Generation, considers how we can take a different approach to social mobility, which refocuses the debate on the real obstacles to opportunity. The most prominent among these are regional disparities, the problem of the “left behind”, and the growing inequality of opportunity across generations.
The solutions to these challenges are more innovation, higher growth, and stronger and more evenly spread economic development.
A new narrative of opportunity
The social mobility commission’s 2024 State of the Nation report revealed large geographical disparities in social mobility outcomes.
Almost all areas with favourable outcomes are either in London or in the adjoining home counties of Surrey, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Those areas with less favourable outcomes, on the other hand, were more likely to be more remote from London and other metropolitan areas, including Cornwall and the north east.
It stands to reason, then, that effective place-based strategies, where local leaders can help to drive change by fostering enterprise, investment and innovation, should form part of our approach.
We can see the emergence of these approaches with the current cross-party consensus on accelerated devolution, but these need to go further in linking economic, educational and social change to be effective.
The role of universities within local growth and innovation partnerships will almost certainly be critical. But alongside this the education and training system must provide genuine choices for young people and adults as they develop and build their careers.
These pathways must place real skills, knowledge, know-how and enterprise at their centre. They must actively challenge the “credentialism” which makes qualifications a barrier rather than a gateway. And they must ensure that the benefits of innovation and growth are shared broadly, improving educational and economic outcomes for the most disadvantaged.
Understanding disadvantage
Another theme of our work is that the current debate about social mobility is confused about the “truly disadvantaged” and that we have a dismal track record of effective practice when it comes to improving their outcomes.
This is partly because of the way the problem is defined, with definitions and data often used carelessly, where education is presented as a magic bullet.
Education does have a uniquely transformational power, but we cannot overlook the economy or the hugely important role of communities, neighbourhoods and families. We also cannot overlook the striking geographical patterns which show many areas with similar characteristics (often post-industrial, seaside or rural) consistently come last in terms of educational achievement.
We are keen to understand the interplay of economic, educational, neighbourhood and family issues, which sit behind these statistics. And we are keen that ‘social mobility’ should not be solely focused on those from poor backgrounds with the potential for elite outcomes.
We are particularly concerned about the problem of 16- to 24-year-old NEETS, and have to ask why so much time and resource is invested in widening participation to university while the same effort to change life chances is not presented to those with the least opportunity.
What next?
There is evidently a great deal of work to be done to improve opportunities for all across the country. We have not set out to provide the answers to every aspect of the problem. The evidence tells us that there are no easy solutions.
However, Innovation Generation sets out to establish a different framework for thinking about social mobility, so that policy relentlessly focuses on changing the things that really matter.
Read the full report, Innovation Generation here
While not ‘obsessing’ about the make up of elite social groups, they absolutely shouldn’t be ignored because of the ever growing wealth gaps between the truly well off and the rest of us.
Unless of course we’re being steered away from that and accept that there is a two tier society and that there should be as little movement between the two as possible.
I’d encourage open debate around the big hardcoded structural wealth inequalities such as student loans, energy standing charges, the disproportionate impact of inflation & of course the hope tax (by which I mean the wolf in sheep’s clothing that is the state encouraged entry level gambling vehicle, the National Lottery, for which a 10 year franchise has been awarded to Allwyn Entertainment owned by a Czech Oil & Gas tycoon!)