UNEQUAL BRITAIN
Unleashing Aspiration, the final report of the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions, found that top professions, such as medicine and law, remained a ‘closed shop’ to all but the most affluent families.
It describes how in Britain family wealth and private education are still the key to well-paid professional jobs and calls for urgent action to challenge the ‘closed shop mentality’ which, it says, continues to characterise the professions in Britain. The report says: ‘There is a chasm between where we are
and where we need to be if Britain is to realise the social benefits of the expected growth in seven million professional jobs in the coming decades’. The cross-party panel, chaired by former minister Alan Milburn, reported that although only seven per cent of the population attend independent schools, more than half of all top professional jobs were taken by candidates who had done so. Currently, 75 per cent of judges, 70 per cent of finance directors and 45 per cent of senior civil servants were privately educated. Failure to break this pattern, the report says, will mean that the opportunity of achieving ‘a second great wave of social mobility’ to match the projected growth in managerial jobs will be lost. The report makes more than 80 recommendations to tackle the problem. These include:
• A national scheme of career mentoring by young professionals and university students and a ‘Yes you can’ campaign, headed by inspirational role models, to raise aspiration among young people;
• A radical overhaul of work experience programmes and a new focus on the teaching of ‘soft skills’ in schools;
• Improved careers advice in schools and colleges; • The removal of the ‘indefensible division between part-time and full-time higher education in relation to funding, regulatory and student support frameworks’;
• Higher education to be more widely available in further education colleges;
• University students to be recruited from a wider range of backgrounds, with ‘fee-free’ degrees for students living at home;
• Closer links between individual schools and local universities; and
• An outreach programme and a system of financial support to ensure that students from all backgrounds have the opportunity to undertake internships (increasingly, the report says, a back-door for better-off, better-connected youngsters).
Unleashing Aspiration: The Final Report of the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions can be downloaded from:
http://www.cabinet
office.gov.uk/media/227102/fair-access.pdf.
However, charging HE with the role of widening access has not proved successful. Michael Osborne points out that ‘despite a plethora of policy initiatives and the use of a variety of interventions, there is continuing under-representation of certain traditionally excluded groups [in Finland, England, France, Australia and Canada]’. So when we read in the Fair Access to the Professions report that independent schooling remains a significant predictor for those who will succeed in the professions, and that there has been a sharp rise in the number of professional jobs which require a higher degree, we could be worried that these ‘initiatives’ have not worked. The report concludes that ‘the balance of evidence suggests that social mobility has neither risen nor fallen in recent decades, but that social mobility in the UK is generally lower than in many countries’. One of the key strengths of the report is that it looks beyond education into working life, bringing together evidence to detail the connection between success in education and success in the workplace. Peter Mandelson is convinced by this argument. He stated in Times Higher Education on 15 October that ‘because education and higher skills are the keys to social mobility, widening access to all forms of training is a matter of equity and social justice as well as one of competitiveness’. However, the report also highlights how the particular cultural and social advantages of the middle and upper classes create a vicious circle of privilege.
10 ADULTS LEARNING NOVEMBER 2009
Drawing on current academic theories of social and cultural capital, where particular groups use their understanding of the system to benefit their and their children’s futures, the report uses statistical evidence to show the correlation between those with financial capital and those with social and cultural capital. ‘Senior professionals have increasingly come from wealthier-than- average backgrounds’, it says. This is all worrying stuff and adds to the sense that our programmes to widen participation have achieved nothing.
Widening participation However, the report is not evaluating the initiatives developed since 1997, it is working with the 1958 and 1970 birth cohorts. The 1958 birth cohort – mine – are now at the height of their earning potential while the 1970 cohort are in their 30s and it is possible to predict their future trajectory. The widening participation initiatives undertaken since 1997 will have only affected those born from 1985 onwards. In other words, it is still too early to tell how the Government’s initiatives to widen participation, and projects such as Aimhigher, have performed. The report is therefore not commenting on these initiatives but rather highlighting what the group feels needs to be done now. In fact, the report recommends many of the activities that Aimhigher and other widening participation programmes currently undertake: aspiration-raising, fair access and vocational routes through school
into further and higher education, particular programmes to encourage the development of knowledge about the professions, and so on. So, most of its recommendations are not new and are, in fact, building on current policies. In reality, given the material analysed, what the report highlights are changes in expectations in British society from the 1960s and 1970s to the 1980s and 1990s. For example, one of the most striking findings in the report is that access to the professions is now dominated by degree qualifications whereas, in the past, several professions had alternative routes. It is also the case that the middle classes, in many areas of the country, abandoned state schooling during the 1980s. As a result, many more people now entering the professions via an HE qualification have been privately educated.
Britain has become a more unequal society since the 1960s; a society in which opportunities and alternative routes are more limited and fixed. In terms of current widening participation activity, I would defend many of the programmes undertaken with young people. These activities are valuable. But evidence from elsewhere, including early evaluations of improvements in attainment in schools, are patchy and do not suggest we have the ‘whole’ solution. I would contend that there are three areas which could complement activities currently being undertaken, all involving a shift in the way we think about these issues. These are: thinking differently about families; thinking
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