Imagining a different life
Britain is a less equal society now than it was in the 1960s. It is too early to assess the impact of current initiatives to improve social mobility by widening participation in education, but their long-term success depends on our changing the way we think about these issues, says MARY STUART
T
he report of the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions, chaired by Alan Milburn, was published at the end of the summer. The report was the result of considerable investigation into the progress, or lack of it, of people from lower socio-economic groups in gaining access to professional jobs. It seems that this issue is one that all the main parties are concerned to address, which suggests that the concept of ‘social mobility’ could be the widening participation focus for the next few years. The report was produced 12 years after New Labour came to power emphasising ‘education, education, education’ as a way of offering opportunity for socially excluded young people. It points out that progress has been limited and in several professions has, in fact, gone backwards. At first glance, one could be forgiven for assuming that the widening participation policies developed since 1997 simply have not worked. However, as I argue below, it is not so much that the policies have not worked but rather that the questions we ask – and, therefore, some of the solutions we have implemented – are not ones that would fully enable us to address the problem. We need to ask different questions, and think about the problems in a different way, if we are to deliver on the promise of these initiatives.
Enabling opportunity for all is a vital goal
for any society but Britain is not alone in struggling to succeed in its aims for social inclusion for all. For example, in the United States the Hurricane Katrina debacle highlighted the extent to which poverty and ethnicity are still interlinked in American society. In education, whether we call the programmes for equity ‘widening participation’, ‘access’ or something else, it is a global issue. Governments across the world argue that increasing the diversity of the tertiary student population is vital to their economic competitiveness and to social cohesion. Increasingly, higher education institutions are expected to contribute to the development of society itself, not just the development of academic knowledge. As the Association of Commonwealth Universities makes clear:
A university’s mission must … be much wider than perpetuating the life of scholarship for its own sake. The world depends increasingly on universities for knowledge, prosperity, health and policy thinking. Universities are thus required to become engines of development for people, institutions and democracy in general. (Engagement as a Core Value for the University, London: ACU, 2001).
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