Reflections on the Future of Social Mobility¹

I've been thinking about the Bridge Group's conference ‘Raising the Stakes: Collective Action in Pursuit of Social Mobility’, hosted by KPMG at their offices in Canary Wharf earlier this month.

The late Maya Angelou (1928–2014), acclaimed poet, essayist and civil rights activist, once said:

After 40 years of researching, teaching about and working in a number of roles to promote wider participation in higher education, I find myself not much liking what I see in front of me, nor what we are leaving behind – in so far as, it seems, it will largely dictate what is to come.

What I see in front of me is very similar to what I saw when I first started full-time teaching in further education (including ‘HE in FE’) back in 1979. The great sadness and frustration is that we seem to have learnt only a little in the intervening years, and particularly about collaborative working.