To promote social mobility, we need to measure it. To measure it, we need to define it. We need to identify markers of socio-economic background. To put it crudely, we need to work out what makes someone working, middle or upper class.

Over the years, I’ve been directly or indirectly involved in many attempts to come up with a simple, but accurate way to define socio-economic background (SEB) for a variety of social mobility and inclusion initiatives. 

Most obviously for me, this has been about university access, wider participation and career opportunities. For many years, the Office of Fair Access & Participation (now part of the Office for Students) has used POLAR quintiles as its headline indicator. This is the rate of progression to higher education from within a postcode. Obviously, this doesn’t equate directly to class and, if the mission to eliminate access gaps were ever successful, POLAR would becoming increasingly meaningless as the differences between quintiles tended to zero.

More recently, OfS introduced TUNDRA, another chilly acronym to identify cold spots of progression. UCAS uses its own Indicators of Multiple Deprivation. Of course, ‘progression’, ‘deprivation’ and ‘class’ are very different things and it’s important not to confuse them, even though the barriers to social mobility may intersect across them.

I could go on listing the zoo of other measures out there, adopting different approaches based on occupational prestige, access to resources (like education or housing), absolute and relative poverty measures, subjective social status, and more marketing-style typologies like, for example, Experian’s colourful Mosaic tool.

Simple or accurate

Last week, this issue of defining background came up in relation to a new project I’m involved in to build more equity, diversity and inclusion into engineering. So I went back to the first work I did on it back in 2010 when the coalition government were first trying to build a Social Mobility Toolkit for employers, providing a comparative way of recording SEB so performance and improved could be measured and tracked.

The assembled experts (which generously included me) compared notes, shook heads, and generally agreed that it is genuinely impossible to come up with a means of classifying individuals that is both simple and accurate. 

Even if a simple measure were ever possible, I’m pretty convinced that an accurate one isn’t. And the simpler it is, the less accurate it gets.

People’s complex individual stories will always be diminished by being put in boxes. That said, aggregated data that approximates at scale to patterns and trends is better than the historic, condescending approach of three classifications of class, based on vague notions about jobs, income, region and accent. (Note the image from the iconic Class Sketch which featured in The Frost Report in 1966, which is copyright, but used under Fair Use.)

How to record and tracking social mobility

So, if you’re an employer, say, who is looking to be more intentionally proactive about social mobility, what data should you gather?

I was inspired to write this by the ever-brilliant Laura McInerney’s blog on Substack in which she mentions coming across the attempt by the Solicitors’ Qualifying Exam, which clearly elevates simplicity over sophistication.

The best practice, I think, is the Government Statistical Service’s recommended series of questions which it has devised to try to harmonise standards. The Government also published this useful guidance for employers (in the financial and professional services sectors, but it applies more generally).

In 2022, the Social Mobility Commission in partnership with The Bridge Group also came up with a new toolkit, which is the gold standard for employers wanting to take social mobility seriously. It includes guidance on what data to gather and how. The Sutton Trust has a similar toolkit too.

Who knows best?

All this data is important and clearly defined terminology is critical if you want to build a solid evidence base. However, when it comes to socio-economic background – or class, as some might call it – there is something to be said for abandoning more scientific approaches and embracing self-identification.

If you’re going to ask questions about someone’s background in order to allot them to a class, why not just ask them – as well or instead – to say where they think they should be placed?

What class you are may well be best defined by where you feel your ‘belong’.

For some people that will never change: former politicians, enrobed in ermine in the Lords, often insist they are still working class. Meanwhile, a titled aristocrat, bankrupt and scraping a living, may never lose their sense of self as upper class. 

For other people, class is mutable. Social mobility, of course, suggests that it is something that can move – or, at least, even if ‘class’ is fixed, everything that gives that word any useful meaning can be changed.

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Will emergency measures prove to have been the key to fairer admissions, based on potential more than performance?

A slightly shorter version of this blog originally appeared on Wonkhe as part of its ‘Build Back Higher’ series of short articles about the potential positive impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on UK higher education.   

In the face of the difficult logistics of feeding his troops, Napoleon looked for innovations to ensure his forces could carry supplies that would remain edible over lengthy campaigns. As a result, margarine was developed as a substitute for the more perishable butter and the canning process was invented. Without war, we would not have baked beans.

As the clichés have it, desperate times call for desperate measures and necessity is the mother of invention.

The pandemic has undoubtedly driven a host of inventive approaches to teaching, assessment and much else that we may want to keep. But surely no one will ever hail the exams debacle of 2020 and the centre-assessed grades that followed as a welcome novelty?

Maybe we should. One day, we might look back on this cohort as the experiment we never could have done otherwise. 2020 may be the year in which almost everyone got the grade they had the potential to get, rather than what they scored on the day of an exam, when they were ill or the exam room was too hot, or when they were fine, but their examiner’s dog had just died.

As Denis Sherwood (@nookophile) has shown, almost half of all exam grades in some subjects are wrong and even Ofqual’s head, Dame Glenys Stacey has acknowledged that exam results have a fuzziness of a grade either way.

Meanwhile good teachers know their pupils and understand what they’re capable of at their best. Surely students should be admitted to university based on what they might achieve if given a chance rather than as a prize-giving ceremony for one day’s performance.

I’d like to think that after this year we will revisit Level 3 assessments (that’s A-Level and their equivalents, but it applies to other levels too, for that matter) and ask whether summative exams tell us what we need to know in order to allocate places in higher education fairly. We’ll reconsider the role of continual assessment and, rather than dismiss teachers’ professionalism, we’ll work harder to eliminate any bias in their judgements (because it’s not as if examiners are immune to bias).

As a result of pandemic panic grading, this year’s entry cohort may turn out to be the most diverse yet and if their learning proves to be as successful as other years, it will be hard to argue why student recruitment shouldn’t take more account of context and less of exam results.

For further reading on this topic I recommend Mark Corver‘s brilliant analysis of admissions driven by predicted grades in HEPI’s recent collection of essays Where next for university admissions?

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Read Fairer funding: the case for a graduate levy (HEPI Policy Note) and, exclusively on this site, Fairer funding: the case for a graduate levy (full proposal).

What I’d like for Christmas:

1. We should abolish tuition fees.
2. We should fund English universities well enough that they can continue to be among the best in the world.
3. We should match graduates and jobs so that they have the right skills to get jobs they want and succeed in them.
4. We should ensure that the nation’s skills gaps are plugged. 
5. We shouldn’t ask the taxpayer to pay for more than the public benefit of higher education. 

Is that really such a big ask? Over decades of fiddling with the funding system for higher education in England, apparently so. That’s because some of my wishes are seen as mutually exclusive.  

The funding of higher education England has been played like a game in which if one player wins, another must lose. For example, if students win and don’t have to pay so much, then the taxpayer loses and has to fork out more.

More usually over the past 30 years, it’s the student who’s lost: the burden of cost has shifted consistently to the student, first through student loans in 1991, then top-up loans, then fees of £1,000, then top-up fees of £3,000 and then, in 2012, a trebling of fees to £9,000. 

The funding system is under review at the moment by Philip Augar at the behest of the Prime Minister (as she is at the time of writing). Leaks suggest the balance may swing back away from the student, but the cost will fall instead on either the taxpayer or on universities in the form of slashed  funding. 

However, there is another player in the game, keeping his gambit very quiet in the hope of not being noticed: the employers. 

For too long employers have escaped making a fair contribution. They would, of course, argue that they do contribute through corporate tax and through salaries (which, on average, are higher for graduates). 

That’s true, but this approach leaves them without any skin in the game. They’re not making their investment work for them. 

I have written a paper for the HE sector’s think tank, the Higher Education Policy Institute on how employers could and should pay a ‘graduate levy’ instead of graduates paying fees. This needn’t cost the employers more and, critically, it would mean they get what they need from higher education far better than at present. 

In the process, it would also eliminate tuition fee debt. It would improve courses and graduate employability. And sure enough, it would fund universities well while costing the taxpayer less.

It sounds too good to be true, so please make up your own mind by reading the HEPI paper or I have also produced, exclusively for this website, an expanded version of the full proposal which also includes fuller explanations and counter-arguments to some objections that have been raised with me in discussion.   

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Today, The Guardian reported the publication of a report out today from the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) with the headline ‘“Less than half’ of tuition fees spent on teaching at English universities‘. 

The headline here is more than a little misleading as the article goes on to report how HEPI’s paper shows how almost all of the tuition fees charged to students at English universities are spent on student-facing costs.

However, to understand this issue, we also need to remember some other stuff about fees.

When fees were tripled to £9k, the intention was that 1/3 of the income over £6k would be spent on access measures (bursaries, outreach, etc). This was never made a specific requirement, but it would amount to 11.7% of what is now a £9,250 fee.

It seems that, while universities do spend a lot on access, there’s a significant underspend compared to this intended level. That’s bad news for access but good news for current students who get more of the the direct value of the fee that is paid on their behalf.

‘Paid on their behalf’ is important here. In the debate about whether students get value for money, we should remember that whatever graduates end up paying, it’s very unlikely to be £9,250.

For some it will be far more. For most it will be far less. The Government reckons about 45% will never be paid by the graduate: the amount they will at some point pay equates to around £5,087 per year of study.

In other words, students pay barely anything more than the direct spend on their teaching and definitely far less than the amount that is spent on things that directly benefit them. That’s good value for money in anyone’s book.

I am not saying that the system of tuition fees is right or fair. Others – taxpayers, employers – get value for money from higher education and the balance of contributions they make may not reflect that equitably.

We should also note that the split of how fees are spent will vary hugely between courses. For an engineering student, the direct cost of teaching will be far higher than for a philosopher. Indeed, some data suggests costs would exceed the whole £9,250 for the engineering course.

That doesn’t mean the philosophy student gets ‘bad’ value though. On average they earn less than engineers, so – if they do – they end up paying less.

It also needs to be pointed out that not all value is measured in money. In fact, what matters most is not.

Two final reflections: I wholeheartedly support the report’s recommendation that ‘student fee’ is more appropriate terminology than ‘tuition fee’ and this paper slam dunks the proof of this.

This level of transparency about how funds are spent is really important. Some of the truths may be awkward, but it’s more awkward to avoid them. The truth here actually turns out to be universities’ friend.

Nick Hillman, Director of HEPI, has argued this last point well in this blog, quoting medieval canon Henry Knighton committing one of history’s worst mixed metaphors when he objected to the translation of the Bible from Latin into English saying, ‘The jewel of the church is turned into the common sport of the people’.

By the way, congratulations on a great piece of work to its authors: Nick Hillman, Jim Dickinson, Alice Rubbra and Zach Klamann.

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BBC Radio 4 reported this morning a leak from the current Augar Review of Post-18 Education Funding. They claimed that a ‘source’ had supported a report in The Times last week that the review would propose that tuition fees should be capped at £6,500 and the “shortfall would be made up by capping student numbers”. 

For starters, the way this is worded makes no sense as capping numbers would only make funding shortfall worse, not better because of loss of economies of scale. I put this down to the BBC’s over-simplified description.

More worryingly, this would be a disaster for any course costing more to run. That’s any STEM courses, specialist courses with a small intake, high-quality courses where the teaching is especially engaged and with low staff-student ratios, courses with lots of students from non-traditional backgrounds, and so on. In order words, it would undermine a damaging proportion of what is best about English higher education. 

Even for arts courses it would place greater pressure on unis to pass course costs to students for materials. The National Union of Students did excellent research in 2012 showing huge hidden costs across many courses, such as thousands of pounds for artists materials, for example.

A £6,500 cap would be a way of incentivising unis only to offer badly taught courses in subjects where the skills shortage is lowest.

To solve the shortfall for STEM subjects, the Government would be forced to top up funding through a teaching grant for particular prescribed subjects. Unless this extra funding is sufficiently generous – i.e. it allows universities to subsidise their overheads – they will still have an incentive not to offer as many of those courses. And even if the top-up were enough, it would still be subject to political control and adequate funding would be impossible to sustain.

These proposals would be a triple whammy for disadvantaged students:

1. The student number cap (which BBC couldn’t confirm with their source) would hit them by limiting places. That means sharp-elbowed, richer or otherwise privileged students get to front of queue.
2. Universities would have no money to support their access activities like outreach, bursaries and other support intended to help non-traditional students into and through higher education.
3. This proposal does nothing to address the main problem of debt for students (as opposed to the Governments financial problems or universities’), which is to do with living costs while studying. This, of course, isn’t just a problem for disadvantaged students, but for almost all students and the reason why student disquiet prompted Theresa May to set up this review in the first place.

I could have said it’s a quadruple whammy for disadvantaged students, because it does nothing to address the collapse of part-time and mature study, which are an especially effective way of opening access to higher education to non-traditional students. However, like student living costs, that’s a wider problem too – one that desperately needs to be solved for sake of students and UK’s skills shortages.

Ultimately, a £6,500 cap doesn’t even help the Government financially anyway. The way student loans are accounted, this would just dump more cost in the deficit, although the imminent (or should I say ‘impending’)  review of accounting arrangements by the Office for National Statistics may change this.

These proposals wouldn’t even be a win politically. The only graduates who would benefit would be those who end up earning most, who might end up paying back less. Most graduates wouldn’t see their repayments change – not the amount, nor how long they make them. This would be a thoroughly anti-progressive approach to the problem.

Even in terms of the political optics, this proposals isn’t sufficiently helpful to students to seem good enough. Indeed, it would just draw attention to how much better Labour’s offer to stop tuition fees altogether appears to be.

Fortunately, this proposal is just a leak and it is unlikely to be much like what finally appears. (The interim report is due in January.) There are too many clever heads on Augar’s team to let this be the true shape of their report (I hope).

I suspect this may be a DfE leak either (a) to prepare the ground for something bad, but less bad, (b) to run ideas up the flagpole, or (c) to create reasons to chuck the Augar Report altogether if they don’t like it.

When I say DfE leak, we may be seeing an internecine battle between HE and FE in the Department. The HE officials may be leaking the worst excesses of mooted proposals in order to goad the HE sector into putting up an opposition, which they’ve been pretty poor at over the last few months. HE officials, right up the the Universities Minister, might well be trying to regain ground versus the effective and worthy campaign that FE sector has waged in support of a better deal for them.

We all (universities, government, students, employers, and the whole of the UK) need much better ideas than this.

With that in mind, I have written a paper with a quite different approach to HE funding that will be published by the Higher Education Policy Institute later this month – watch this space.

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Widening participation: Who gains? This is the text of a presentation I gave recently at a roundtable outlining the case for employers to get involved in the promotion of wider access to higher education.

Why should employers care about widening participation in higher education?

The answer depends on how we see the role of HE in society. Among other things, it is a training ground for the workforce, many of whom work within the private sector. Even if they don’t end up as private sector employees, having a larger supply of graduates is a cultural and economic resource that drives regional, national and global prosperity which is good for business. 

    So, if we fail to have the widest possible participation is HE, it’s like trying to water the flower beds with one foot on the hosepipe.

    Let’s forget social equality, that a fairer society is intrinsically better and that all parts of society benefit from a better whole. There are, I would argue, three clear and distinct commercial benefits 

1. WP in HE allows social diversity in business, particularly at higher levels. That in turn also means other types of diversity: ethnicity, age, gender, disability, etc. This creates companies that look like their customers, greater empathy, broader experience, etc. I remember hearing an HR Director from a high street bank telling a conference she wasn’t interested in diversity, she just wanted the best people for the job. I’m glad to say she was taken to task for failing to recognise that she would not have the best people for the job unless they were diverse, because her customers were diverse and as a business they would fail to understand them if they were not representative of them. 
   
2. Where do we find talent? Does privilege exactly coincide with ability? If so, then no, employers don’t need WP. If not, however, then fishing in a talent pool that includes the disadvantaged means more fish with more talents and a greater probability of a greater number of employers catching the right fish for the job. 
   
3. How do you retain and strengthen your existing workforce? Does it not make sense to keep upskilling your staff, ideally with recognised qualifications taught by institutions that are educational experts? In other words, why don’t more employers work with universities to provide courses, particularly part-time, to their staff? This is the really tough battlefront in WP. Some of the greatest barriers are the need for people to keep working to pay the bills and the fact that people feel they’ve “missed their chance”. 
   

Even if we can all agree that these are real and significant benefits, what can the private sector do about increasing and widening participation? 

We need to follow the pipeline back to find out why individuals do not participate.  Pretty soon you get to schools and colleges. There is a moment – or many moments – when someone – we – could step in and influence a key decision at just the right time. 

In fact more usually, it’s not that people decide not to go to uni. It’s that they don’t make a decision at all and are left with a socially determined default option. For the advantaged, that means they do go to uni. For the disadvantaged, it means they don’t. 

So, who can intervene? Teachers and parents – but they’re just another step back in the pipeline. How do you engage, inform and – using a word David Willetts seemed disturbingly keen at a meeting I attended a couple of days ago – “nudge” them? 

Then there are careers advisers. Sadly, the Government has virtually dismembered the careers profession in England, hacking away like a metronome with an axe. 

I think it’s a scandal that there’s no funding, no national body, no requirement even that ensures that the words ‘career’ or ‘university’ are even spoken to students in post-16 education, let alone actually giving them impartial, high-quality careers support.

We need to make up for this careers advice vacuum. If someone is stuck in a hole – and being in the hole is the only thing they’ve ever known, and they have no ladders or grappling hooks – then you can’t wait for them to magically rise up out of it just because you make things ever more attractive outside the hole. You need to reach out to them to help them up.

And what do we call this reaching out? We call it outreach. Timely interventions that get in the way of their normal daily business – in their schools, their homes or their place of work – and which strike a chord with them.

Outreach is not cheap though. It’s rarely worth it for a private sector organisation to go into a school, say, at a cost of hundreds if not thousands of pounds to talk to maybe 50 students. Any cost-benefit analysis will torpedo that one. 

But what if 50 organisations were willing to chip in and what if it weren’t just one school, but hundreds?  Suddenly the cost is spread, the benefits are increased and the reach is widened. 

We need collaborative outreach between all parties with an interest in WP: universities, Government and the private sector. Collaboration has other benefits too: 

• The outreach gets better because quality assurance is easier to manage;
• The resources can be allocated more effectively through coordination. That means better geographic and demographic coverage at lower cost;
• The whole exercise becomes more measurable, therefore more evidence-based and therefore, in the long-term, ever more effective;
• And follow-up activities can reflect a wider range of options (whether it’s an invitation to a uni summer school, a mentoring project or an invitation to apply for a sponsored degree scheme or a school-leaver programme).

There are many examples of good collaborative outreach projects, but not enough and without enough collaboration. Many are funded by HE. For example, although AimHigher was ‘discontinued’ by the Government, regionally collections of universities have decided to keep some similar arrangements going. There are other third sector initiatives such as Future First, Into University, The Access Group, MyKindaCrowd, Brightside, etc, many of which are engaged in some form of outreach. 

Most of the private sector however hasn’t seen this at its responsibility. So far. 

Without wanting to make this look like a plug, what I’ve been talking about is the reasoning behind another outreach initiative which my own organisation runs: Push. Please forgive me for telling you a little more by way of illustration of how, I believe, collaborative outreach can work and how we’re putting what I believe into practice.

We took a National Careers Award-winning programme of schools outreach that we’d been doing for nearly 20 years and decided to get private sector businesses and universities to support it as a focus for some of their outreach. We received backing from the Association of Graduate Recruiters and a number of key employers. Along with support from various other stakeholders and universities means we now reach nearly 400 schools a year, amounting to over 30,000 students. 

We gather contact details which means that it can be just the first step in a ongoing process of ever-mounting engagement with choices about which options suit them best. This is run as a social enterprise which means that the more organisations we involve, the more backing we get, the wider the reach and the more students and the supporting organisations benefit. It’s all based on a win-win strategy for everyone.

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