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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In my last blog post, I mentioned that I’d got into a correspondence with teacher and author Matt Pinkett about whether young people – especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds – should aspire to university.

Matt suggested that perhaps young people should set their sights on the career they want and, if they can’t make serious progress towards it as they leave school, then they should consider university as a back-up – a ‘failsafe’, as he called it. 

After our previous discussions, he asked what I thought about this. This was my response (with a few edits to make it a blog more than a email to Matt)…

I don’t think I agree with the idea of university as a ‘failsafe’, although I’m still not sure I understand what you intend by the word. So I’m going to use Matt Pinkett’s line: ‘Aim for whatever you want to do, and if you don’t get it, well, at least you can go to university.’ That assumes that whatever you want to do won’t be best achieved by going to uni.

Obviously, university is not the best route for everything or for everyone, but for the vast majority of the best paid and most secure jobs, it is – if not a prerequisite – at least a head start.

The evidence is pretty clear: on average, uni helps everyone regardless of background, earn more in life and have other benefits such as health and happiness. It doesn’t eliminate the social advantages some were born with, but it does narrow the gap a bit.

For many students with disadvantage, higher education is not only transformative, it is almost the only thing that could ever have provided them with that transformation. On average, uni would be the right thing to do, if you are able and so minded. 

However, the sticking point there is ‘on average’. There are some people whom it won’t suit or for whom it further their aspirations. I never try to persuade people to go to uni, but I do try to outline the advantages – and disadvantages – so they can make an informed choice for themselves. You need to consider the individual. All guidance should be ‘Person first’. Or, more to the point, the person should consider their individual needs for themselves.

Rather than ‘aim for what you want to do’, I tend to think about ‘what do you want to be’.

For all of us, the answer to that is that we want to be happy. What happiness means to each of us and what will bring that happiness is different (and changes over time), but it might involve earning a lot (however much ‘a lot’ might be); it might be fame, security, a work:life balance, a family, power, a sense of doing something worthwhile etc. Each of us has a set of rewards we want in life and each career has the potential to deliver a different set of rewards. Finding a career that delivers the set you want is half the journey.

The other half is to be able to offer to that career the skillset that the employer will want. Just as each career offers a different reward set, each one demands a different skillset. If you don’t have the suitable skillset, the job might be a good match for you, but you’re not a good match for it.  

It’s worth unpacking what that skillset actually is. It’s not just skills, but broad ‘employability’. Employability comprises the following in no particular order:

(1) Skills:
(a) Hard skills, ie job specific skills, such as welding if you want to be a welder;
(b) Soft skills, ie transferable skills, such as communication, team work or numeracy, which are all useful in any job, albeit to varying degrees.

(2) Knowledge, some of which is specific to the job (eg. a surgeon’s understanding of anatomy), but much of it is broader (although to some extent, this comes up in (4) below)

(3) Character, which comprises attitude, behaviours and personality (and includes important traits like grit, resilience and a growth mindset, but also determination, politeness and amiability).  

(4) Social capital, or how society perceives your intrinsic value (based on class, age, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, height, accent, use of the right fork, etc). This is the often unwelcome component of employability because it explains why Boris Johnson gets to be Prime Minister with a record of being repeatedly sacked when anyone from a disadvantaged background wouldn’t have been given a second chance. We cannot ignore social capital though, if only to recognise that, in order to make it matter less, you need to ensure you have all the other components in overwhelming supply. There are also things that one can do to build social capital – most importantly, the wider knowledge is key to this and not in a bad way.

Although these four components comprise ‘employability’, actually we are talking about something far broader than merely producing career fodder. We’re talking about creating rounded people: someone with a full complement of the four components is well equipped for making a life, not just a living.

What role does university play in any of this? It’s easy to see that disadvantaged students might start out with even more limited employability than more affluent students. University explicitly sets out to build knowledge and often hard skills too. It builds soft skills, although it tends to do this implicitly. It builds social capital through exposure to a wider cross-section of society, establishing networks and broadening horizons. It might also build character, but it is arguable whether it does so better than the ‘university of life’. In any case, research shows that disadvantaged students tend to have a lower propensity to take advantage of many of the character-building opportunities (such as extra-curricular activities) that uni might offer. This is often down to money, circumstances and habits formed in school.

When you look at it like this, you can see how uni builds employability into a quality some researchers have called ‘graduateness’, which is clearly prized by employers.

So, should uni be a failsafe or a first option? As I said, it has to be down to the individual and the gap between their skillset and that required by the career that might fulfil their reward set.

Critical to this is the questions of ‘if not uni, then what?’ Around 50% of school-leavers do not go to university. Most go into jobs (usually just ‘jobs’, rather than ‘careers’). A few go into apprenticeships, training or other non-higher education. Too many become NEETs (Not in Education, Employment or Training). There’s not a sufficiently good other pathway (although there absolutely should be) and, unless there is a better option, university must surely look attractive to anyone with the grades and willingness to spend longer in education.

Degree apprenticeships are a decent option, but they are few and far between, fairly limited in the choice of jobs, and subject to many of the same prejudices against the disadvantaged that exist at any level of employment.

I haven’t touched here on the fact that uni is an expensive option. It is. And I believe the student/graduate’s contribution to the cost is disproportionate. (In fact, I have proposed an alternative system of funding.) That said, uni is pretty much free at the point of entry and you only pay when you earn a decent wage. In that sense, cost should not be seen as a barrier, although it might be seen as an impediment.

I agreed with Matt Pinkett that he could also publish my comments on his own blog which can be found at All Ears. I’m really grateful to him for what’s been – for me at least – an interesting discussion.

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Back in August, a teacher drew my attention to the following tweet and asked if I might be able to answer it:

Can anybody point me to research regarding outcomes in later life for disadvantaged students who go to university vs. disadvantaged students who don’t? https://t.co/BiYatOdKMh

— Mr Pink (@Positivteacha) August 1, 2019

The tweet was from Matt Pinkett (@PositivTeacha), teacher, blogger and author of Boys don’t try? Rethinking masculinity in schools.

My thread of tweets in response sparked a correspondence between us and, in the end, Matt was kind enough to say I had challenged his whole perspective. He suggested others might be interested too and I should publish some of my thoughts on the topic. 

So, in the first of two blogs (here’s the second), here’s how I responded to his initial question… 

There is plenty of research showing a significant earnings premium on average for graduates regardless of background. Probably the most comprehensive work is the paper by the IFS ‘How English domiciled graduate earnings vary with gender, institution attended, subject and socio-economic background’. The Sutton Trust has also done many excellent studies on different aspects of this question which is actually a lot more complex than it sounds.

Policy Press | The End of Aspiration? – Social Mobility and Our Children’s Fading Prospects, By Duncan Exley

 

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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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