Justine Greening: How we can all pledge to improve social mobility (and we don’t need the Government to tell us what to do)

It asks companies to get into schools to help show children and young people the opportunities that are out there for them, to give work experience or apprenticeships that provide real experience and skills, and to have fair recruitment so that young people who are rough diamonds don’t get screened out before they’ve even walked through the door.

You can find out more about it on www.socialmobilitypledge.org.

The past 12 months haves seen more support from businesses and beyond than I ever imagined, all of them prepared to go the extra mile on providing more opportunities. Hundreds of companies, large and small, have signed up, collectively employing over two million employees.

From Yorkshire alone, companies ranging from Morrisons, Skipton Building Society, Yorkshire Water, Sewell Group, banking group CYBG, to universities like Sheffield Hallam, Leeds Trinity, and York St John are all part of the push.

Justine Greening: it’s in the interests of Yorkshire business to fight for social mobility

And it quickly became clear that the organisations involved wanted to do lots more than just support the campaign – they wanted to share their own experiences and best practice with others and learn from one another about how to do even better. The Social Mobility Pledge campaign now works with these employers, helping them document what’s working in what we call Insight Reports which are steadily going on our website for anyone to look at. It means new businesses getting involved don’t have to reinvent a wheel when another business like theirs is already doing great things.

The reality is that many of the answers on improving social mobility are already out there. The key is using the Social Mobility Pledge to allow all the experience, innovation and know-how from great employers to be shared.

Some of those trailblazing companies are right here in this region. One of the most creative businesses I’ve met supporting the Social Mobility Pledge is the Sewell Group in Hull. Over the years, they’ve worked hard to get a real mix of different young people through their doors and to cut through the management layers so that they get involved in strategy and decision-making in a way I haven’t seen anywhere else.

Some companies have excellent school-based projects and relationships that bring careers alive in engineering, IT or the professions that young people may never have considered. Another allowed a science teacher to spend time in different parts of an engineering businesses to enable them to help their students understand how STEM subjects get used in practice.

On recruitment we’ve heard from lots of companies, not only how they’ve widened out their talent search, but the simple steps they’ve taken as businesses to make sure they don’t lose talent once it arrives because it doesn’t feel it fits in. We want to share those insights and many more with the hundreds of other Pledge companies now working with us.

It’s striking how little of this best practice needs any sort of law change from Westminster to help it happen on a bigger scale. It’s about attitude and culture change. So, if Parliament is a little preoccupied with Brexit, it doesn’t need to hold us up from getting grass roots change on the ground. Whatever’s happening in Parliament, the Social Mobility Pledge and its growing employer supporters will keep working away, sharing our collective knowledge and making a practical difference for young people.

Our work shows that though improving social mobility also needs leadership, this can come from anywhere and is not just about political leadership. Whether it is from those running companies, from local authorities who know they can do more on this, like my own Wandsworth Borough Council, from universities who understand the crucial role they play in developing talent and then connecting it up with careers, we’ve all got a role.

Like many other long-term issues, it may be that politics just gets in the way of practical solutions. But through the 
Social Mobility Pledge, hopefully we’re showing a fresh way of delivering change – less of a debate on the differences and more collective action on a common agenda.

I’ve often said that social mobility is like a million-piece jigsaw. The complexity and scale of the social mobility challenge for Britain can feel bewildering, but it doesn’t need to be in practice. The million-piece jigsaw means that one of those pieces can easily be your business, your organisation – and that includes The Yorkshire Post!

Are you in schools talking to young people about careers and opportunities you can offer? Are you open to work experience or doing apprenticeships? Have you looked to make sure your recruitment is fair? If you can do that, then you’re fixing your piece of the jigsaw.

That’s what all the other Social Mobility Pledge companies are doing. Join them. If everyone does it, Britain changes. There’s no need to wait for Westminster, we can do it for ourselves.

Happy Easter.

Justine Greening is a Conservative MP for Putney. Born in Rotherham, she is the former Education Secretary.