Professor Liz Mossop, Professor Kathryn Mitchell and Professor Graeme Atherton.

Q13 The Chair: Good morning and welcome. Thank you very much for coming to give evidence on our inquiry into social mobility. Could we start by asking you all to briefly introduce yourselves and say why you think we have chosen you?

Professor Liz Mossop: Good morning, everybody. I am the vice-chancellor of Sheffield Hallam University, which is one of the largest modern universities in England. I imagine I am here because we are a university that is absolutely engaged in the social mobility agenda. Nice to be here, thank you.

Professor Graeme Atherton: I am vice-principal at Ruskin College, Oxford, as well as associate pro-vice-chancellor for regional engagement at the University of West London. For 13 years I was head of the National Education Opportunities Network, a national organisation for widening access to higher education in England and the UK. I think that I am here because of that work and international work I have done in the area of access to higher education and social mobility.

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: I am the vice-chancellor at the University of Derby. I also have been the chair of an Opportunity Area because Derby was an Opportunity Area, and I remain the chair of the Priority Education Investment Area for Derby. Clearly, the University of Derby is very much invested in a socially mobile agenda.

The Chair: Because time is relatively tight, if one of your colleagues has given a definition of social mobility that you think is fine, you do not need to say it again except to agree. Of course, one of the things we are grappling with is: how do we define social mobility and why does it matter? I would be grateful to whomever wishes to start helping us in answering that question.

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: I am happy to start. I have a particular view of social mobility. The concept of widening access is part of a longevity of how universities have considered their engagement with social mobility. My view is very much that widening access is incredibly important, but the most important thing is the equity of education when a student from a widening-access background enters the higher education system, and the equity at the end of it. When they arrive, they have very different opportunities to access different types of employment and different types of engagement with the organisation.

For me, a university that suggests it is driving social mobility might not be delivering it in the same way to students who are coming from different backgrounds with different outlooks on life. Social mobility needs to be judged on what the student looks like at the end of their time at university and their prospects for the future, not on how they enter.

Professor Graeme Atherton: I would also say that social mobility fundamentally is an economic concept. We define it as economic progress for individuals. It is important to remember as well that that economic progress looks different for different groups and different people. What it is not about—as some work in social mobility in higher education has done—is looking at those young people who are very able and ensuring they go to very selective institutions. That is a very important thing for those young people, but it is a broader idea than that and a broader reality than that.

Also, it is thinking about how we understand place, because you can be socially mobile in your own place. The research we have done talking to communities across the country shows that sometimes those we are trying to support think that it means leaving your community, your family, your place. People do not necessarily want to do that. Some do, some do not. It is really important that we create opportunities for progression economically and through life, across life, within the context that is right for you, which can obviously be within your own particular locality and community. Those who want to move also need opportunities.

Professor Liz Mossop: Absolutely. I completely agree with all that, so I will not add to that, but what I would just say is something specific to universities. It is important to remember that universities transform lives, and I always like to put, in brackets, “not just of our students”, because universities work extensively within the communities in which we exist. We are institutions of our place, and therefore, we have a key role to play with multiple different stakeholders in those places to support social mobility activities. As Graeme says, that is not just about economic improvement, it is other areas as well.

The Chair: Yes, so to think of it as just climbing up, as it were, which we have heard from other witnesses, is incomplete.

Professor Liz Mossop: Exactly, it is about the system and how we can address inequalities across the whole system—not just in education, but in the place we are all in.

The Chair: That is a very helpful start. There may be some supplementaries on these questions later on from colleagues.

Q14 Lord Young of Cookham: Can we drill down a bit and ask how your institutions address the challenge of social mobility? Professor Mitchell just said what matters is not how people enter the system but what they look like at the end. All three of you do heroic work in reaching out to disadvantaged students and students from challenging backgrounds. You build their self-confidence and self-expression, and you broaden their knowledge. But at the end of that, have you actually changed their social mobility? What really matters is how they use those skills, and that they get a decent income and use their skills in a career that matters. How do you build on the work you have done, the investment you have made, and transform those skills so we actually later achieve social mobility for the groups that you are looking after?

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: I suppose, for me, in a place-based environment like Derby, we need to also be working with employers in understanding how we can give students that confidence so they are not just confident of being in a university, but confident in moving on and transitioning into the workplace. We have done a lot of initiatives at working as a whole system across Derby and Derbyshire, and I hope many of my students not only stay in the locality but do move outside the locality, because they come from outside the locality too.

The one piece of work that I felt we really needed to do was work with employers for them to understand what social mobility was in their own organisations, so looking at different types of study pathways that enable that confidence to come through. Apprenticeships are an enormous part of the University of Derby, and they have enabled that. It is not just about disadvantage; it is about giving a wide range of young people different options for how they could study and learn and grow with confidence.

The critical element was some of my big employers deciding to look at the Social Mobility Commission to look at how they could work with us in the university. Instead of saying, “Please come in, employers, and talk with my students and do a milk round,” like we used to, it is almost like, “How are we working with them?” It is not just about the experiences but actually ensuring that they are getting the right skills and the right language for them to be able to be successful. That is quite critical for me in how we are going to assure employers support and challenge the University and our students.

Lord Young of Cookham: A colleague may want to answer the next question. One of the themes of what you do is you build aspiration. How do you manage those students who, for whatever reason, do not get into an apprenticeship? They leave with a diploma, a certificate, or a degree, but the local job market just cannot absorb those skills. How do you manage those students for whom there is no immediate opportunity of an apprenticeship or a job?

Professor Liz Mossop: I am happy to answer that. It is really important to recognise that when you leave university with a degree in X subject, that also sets you up with a huge range of transferable skills. While there may be a challenge in a local region around a particular skill set, part of our job as a university is to help students understand that those skills can be lifted up and used elsewhere. So, there are transferable skills, and of course, we embed employability skills within the curriculum.

It is not that we are asking students to do things above and beyond, because that is a challenge if you are a student with caring responsibilities, or you have other things going on in your life that mean you cannot do extracurricular activities. But what that means is that by inherently doing your degree, you will develop the skills that mean you then have a great future ahead of you, and I hope your aspirations can be reached.

Professor Graeme Atherton: I would add that in London, of course, the labour market is very dynamic, and there are opportunities there, but for some there are not. For instance, at the university we have an incubation hub where students can develop their own business ideas and innovatory ideas, because of course, small and medium-sized enterprises are a growth area. That is where many people are employed in this country. We try to encourage our students to find their own pathways. Some are not into large employers; they are developing their own business ideas, their own partnerships and collaborative ideas. We have a space there that supports those students. It also supports them not just in developing ideas, but in finding finance and partners and collaborative opportunities. There are a number of ways in which we try to support our students—across the panel we do—with their various aspirations, which are very different.

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: Can I just add one thing? The evidence that we are looking at right now at Derby shows that when a graduate who comes from the most disadvantaged backgrounds gets a job, their salary might not be sometimes perceived as a graduate-level salary, but it is 30% higher than the communities in which they are living. That actually gives aspirations back. We still have to work with them, but we are creating economic viability in communities, some of which have no economic viability. There is a whole social piece that is quite important, about the question of whether that a graduate salary alone is important, or whether it is actually going to be influencing the communities they have come from.

Q15 Lord Johnson of Marylebone: The post-1992s, the modern universities, have done most of the heavy lifting in terms of widening participation over the last decade or so. How effective do you think the system of access and participation plans as a requirement for charging the higher rate of fees has been, in terms of getting other institutions to do their bit in widening access?

Professor Graeme Atherton: Without access and participation plans, we would not be in the situation we are now, with regard to widening-access work. Looking internationally, they are a globally leading mechanism to bring universities to the table on this one. However, of course, they also have challenges. There have been a lot of changes in how APPs are structured from the Office for Students over recent years. There is a lot of writing of plans as well as delivery of plans. As Kath talked about earlier, they certainly have been very effective in terms of supporting universities to support students through higher education, as well as into higher education.

Access and participation plans sit alongside other regional collaborative funded projects, which are really important as well; place-based projects have a crucial role to play. I am sure you know about those pieces of work as well, Lord Johnson. Yes, they have been very important, but of course, they also have areas where they could be improved, particularly in the monitoring of plans. Stability is really important as well with planned delivery, but certainly, if you look internationally, they are very important too.

Professor Liz Mossop: Yes. In Sheffield, you will be aware that there are obviously two large universities: Sheffield Hallam—my own institution—and the University of Sheffield. They are very different institutions, but we know that when we work together, we are better at these things. A lot of our access work is done in partnership. We have a partnership organisation, which is part of the Uni Connect scheme, but we have a separate bit as well that sits alongside it.

While traditionally you are right, increasingly other institutions are realising the importance of this work. That would be absolutely catalysed by the access and participation plans. That has made a difference. But as Graeme says, there are challenges around the stability of those plans and what we are being asked to do, and of course there are challenges of evaluation because we all know the importance of evaluating and working out what works, but that is very tricky—very difficult. Lots of work has been done on it more recently, which is making it easier for us all to think about that, but actually finding the resource to do that, et cetera, is challenging, particularly in these difficult times for higher education.

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: I would just add that the change to APP is challenging us as a sector, rather than just as the post-1992 universities or modern universities. It has led to more creative opportunities. We have a programme called Derby Scholars, where we work between Cambridge and Derby in looking at how we can challenge some of our really talented young people to think differently about education.

Q16 Lord Ravensdale: I would like to pick up on what you said, Professor Mitchell, about how obviously getting employers on board, and getting them to consider social mobility and that partnership approach, is critical to this. I wonder if you could maybe provide a bit more detail on how that has worked in practice, how that has been set up, and how working with employers has formed and what mechanisms are in place in your area.

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: The challenge is that it is easier to work with the larger employers than the smaller employers. We are very much place-based in Derby, in the sense that we have the headquarters of Rolls-Royce, and we have some of the smallest companies in the country. What I would say is that we have tried to create an infrastructure, and it is very much place-driven. The university, all the secondary schools, and the majority of the primary schools have a committee that we all still attend. It came out of the Opportunity Area, and we have not dropped that approach. What we realised was that we needed to have employers and those groups sitting on those committees with us, because in fact, during the Opportunity Area we tended to think about what we should be doing and then go and ask employers, “Is this okay?” Actually, we needed the voice from the beginning.

We have a very important infrastructure. It would not run unless the university was driving it, because schools do not have the capacity, or the time, or the infrastructure to think about that themselves. So it is run out of the university, and we get the heads of school, and particularly some of our larger trusts, to really try to drive that relationship.

It is important to get employers in at the very early ages. In some schools, we have three generations of families who have been unemployed, and therefore people have not seen how they could engage with either education or work. We have a series of programmes, in which employers are now going in and working with schools from a very early age. The other bit we found was employers used to go and say, “Hey, this is what I do,” and children were not particularly interested in somebody who thought their job was very exciting. In fact, now we have much more practical-based approaches held at the university. We had a big really supported by you, Lord Ravensdale, called Science in the City. We had, from primary and all the way through to secondary, two full days where young people came and explored all the opportunities on offer.

For me, it is a whole-based approach. That is the role for a university like Derby in its region. It has to take on that responsibility: if we want to be successful, we actually have to have a thriving education system in the region for everybody, and therefore the university can play a significant role in that. But it needs to be structured. Government gave the opportunity to somewhere like the city of Derby through the Opportunity Area to set that up. I do not know if you need an Opportunity Area to do it, but you need an infrastructure that allows all that engagement to take place. I am very much of the opinion that an ecosystem of education starts at nurseries and involves lifelong learning, so universities play a critical part in that.

Professor Liz Mossop: Can I give an additional example from South Yorkshire? We have something in South Yorkshire called the South Yorkshire Innovation Programme, which is a collaboration between the two universities—Hallam and the University of Sheffield—our combined authority, and the local authorities. That is all about working with businesses directly to help improve economic growth in the region. What is quite unique about it, is that it has a lot to do with what we can do as universities with our students and with those businesses.

There are lots of different examples. It might be that a business needs particular advice about something that our academics can give, but then that might grow into a student project, which obviously helps with students’ employability skills. Some imaginative thinking can really start addressing those systemic issues and tackling problems from multiple different angles, rather than just thinking, “Oh, we’ve got to work with businesses and we’ve got to work with schools”. We need to bring things together, and really thinking about the problem in a systems-based way definitely helps. That funding from their authority helps as well, of course. That is a good example of place-based working.

Professor Graeme Atherton: I have just one final point before we move on to the next question. It is also a cultural issue within the institution. If you think about the universities, and academics and staff, obviously for academics, teaching and research is the core part of their work, and they progress generally by research and research publications. If you want individual academics, schools, deans and faculty to work with employers, you have to create a culture within your university that rewards that work and recognises that work. Otherwise, at an individual level, your focus is on your publications, which might not be the same thing as working with employers, of course.

It is for leaders like Liz, Kath and others—my vice-chancellor as well—to create within their own institutions a cultural and structural context in which individual academics and colleagues can work with employers, knowing that it is part of what is valued in their work. That is really important.

Lord Hampton: I would like a very quick clarification, if I could. Professor Mitchell, you said all the secondary schools and most of the primary schools have a committee. I am a secondary school teacher.

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: I do not sit on them; my team sits on them. We have a secondary school group, and we have a primary school group, and the heads all come together, and they have an established group. Derby had that, but the Opportunity Area really consolidated that. They actually pay into it as a group of organisations. They are called SSG—Secondary School Group—and PSG, but it means we have a forum in which we can go and talk, and they can bring employers in, and they have representation.

That has been really powerful. When I first started the Opportunity Area, I was told, “Be careful of going into the secondary schools, you might not be welcomed”. It was tough, but actually what I would say is we now have a really strong community base. We did an event the other night, as I said, and they were all sitting and in attendance. For me, that is quite powerful in creating an ecosystem for education.

Lord Evans of Rainow: Why would you not be welcome?

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: Well, it was a question of, “What’s a vice-chancellor think they are coming to talk to school head teachers about?” The thing is, I was not the expert; they were the experts. That is what I made clear: I was there to support them in driving the education in the city. That has led to a much better way of working. You do not want someone coming to pontificate at you when you are not the expert.

Q17 Lord Evans of Rainow: Professor Atherton, you mentioned about setting up hubs for entrepreneurs to set up businesses. Professor Mitchell, you talked about the importance of apprenticeships. The fact that Derby has the headquarters of Rolls-Royce is an interesting case study of such opportunity literally there in the supply chain. All those opportunities, yet you have three generations of unemployed people. Just with that in mind, they are wonderful initiatives, but this committee has identified that there is a lack of data. What you can measure, you can manage and you can improve. My question is: what impact does your organisation’s initiative have locally, and how do you evaluate this? Does it improve social mobility, and if so, how do you know that? How do you measure it?

Professor Graeme Atherton: At the individual institutional level, we have strong data on who progresses into the institution by social background, and we have strong data now via the Longitudinal Educational Outcomes dataset on the earnings of our students. To give you an example: at the University of West London, around 60% of our students are the first in the family to go into higher education, and around 50% come from a lower-IMD area. We look at the earnings of those students, and our students are earning the median wage, or above the median wage, by 25. That is only by 25, remember. If you look at the data on those from low-IMD areas, only 30% of those young people would be earning that wage by 25. We can have a good idea that enabling young people to enter our institution means they have a better chance of higher earnings than those who do not.

We evaluate individual activities and initiatives quite strongly; I am sure Kath and Liz do as well. We think very clearly about the outcomes, and we think clearly about ensuring, through techniques such as randomised control trials and control group work, that what we are doing would not happen anyway. We have worked extensively, for instance, with the TASO evaluation network, to ensure that in our institution we have the best practice in terms of evaluation. We look at the big data, the overall data on earnings and progression.

It is very important to focus not just on overall data for all students, but to home in on students from the backgrounds you want to support. We can show that the chances of them earning high incomes by going to an HE, into our institution, are much higher than they would be if they did not. We evaluate individual programmes specifically, thinking about the particular impact and thinking about it over time. It is important to have stability, as I mentioned earlier on. The most successful of the programmes we are discussing today have been running over a period of time. The problem with these initiatives is that they come and go very quickly. We need a period of data over a period of time to see if it is making an impact.

Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath: Excuse me, can I just ask what TASO? Did you say TASO?

Professor Graeme Atherton: I cannot remember the acronym now, but TASO was initially set up by the Office for Students, and funded by the Office for Students, to support universities in their evaluation of widening access and outcomes work. It is like a What Works Centre, if you like, for this space.

Professor Liz Mossop: That follows on from the point I made about the complexity of evaluating a lot of our access and participation activities, and as Graeme has already pointed out, it is complex—it is difficult. It does not mean we should not do it, and there are a lots of different variables going on there, but it means sometimes it is hard to pin down the exact evidence of what is working, which is to your point as well. That does not mean we should stop doing things, by the way, but it is better to focus on the things that work.

Professor Graeme Atherton: It has always been a challenging area, for sure. It always has been.

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: Data is really, really important. We have been tracking our students we would have classified from the lower POLAR quintiles since 2010 to 2011. I can share that evidence, because we have found out things that did not work and the projects that worked. Actually, we can see about 33% of the people we tracked of the 10,000 who have gone through the system are in higher education with a graduate salary. We have more graduates not identified as a graduate salary now, and that is the piece of work I want to do: are they still having an impact at an economic level?

The Chair: We would be very grateful if you could give us that information. As much as anything, it would be helpful to know what did not work, and what started off presumably with all the best intentions, but did not actually get you anywhere.

Q18 Baroness Garden of Frognal: The first question is mainly to Graeme, but I am sure Liz and Kathryn also. What is your view about the general provision of educational opportunities across different regions in the UK? You have already mentioned the pull of London, but living in London is prohibitively expensive, so people who want to get jobs here will very often find that they are really strapped for cash to live on. For Liz and Kathryn, what problems do your organisations face in delivering initiatives to improve social mobility, and what can you do to address that?

Professor Graeme Atherton: What I would say, Sue, is that we have good data on differences in regional outcomes. Let us take one example: in the progression of learners from a free school meal background to higher education, the area of the highest level of progression is Westminster with 62%, and the area of the lowest is South Gloucestershire with 12%. There is a massive difference across the country. We know a lot about the data in terms of outcomes.

We know a little less in terms of the actual sense of opportunities in some areas. Kath, you have pointed out the extensive work you have done in the Opportunity Area, which allows you to understand what is happening in Derby; I think Liz as well. We understand some other parts of the country a little less. Particularly, we know that there are differences in HE provision regionally. We know there are cold spots and hotspots in provision in higher education. We know that makes a difference as well. Other data we have looked at shows that overall the types of areas with the lowest HE participation are rural, but highest of course is London. London is very different in its make-up, but it has a very high number of higher education institutions, participation and opportunities.

Opportunities differ greatly. There is some work to be done in terms of bringing this information together about different kinds of opportunities and ecosystems, the word that Kath mentioned. We understand that well in some areas, less well in others. Understanding that across the country is an important piece of work to do. Bringing that together is also important, because it is not just about higher education: changes in the way that school systems work, academisation, et cetera mean you have lots of different providers in an area doing excellent work, but a sense of what that means in an area is not always captured.

Layering to that as well, of course, are devolution issues and the idea that in certain combined authority areas, there might be a sense of oversight. We know some mayoral authorities are doing very good work. We also have some areas not covered by a mayoral authority at the moment. It is a very variable picture, and one we certainly need to know more about.

Professor Liz Mossop: From the point of view of challenges for us in delivering our initiatives, I would start by just picking up on your point earlier, Graeme, around culture. It is really important for the organisation to support these activities—not just from an economical perspective, but actually facilitating academics, other colleagues, professional service colleagues, and experts in this area to do these activities is really, really important. That is very cultural. It is very much about leading and saying, “This is the right thing for us to be doing, this is why we are here. Our mission is to transform lives; therefore, this is what we do around here”. That is very important.

Of course, resource is always going to be a challenge. Particularly in the current context in higher education, which I am sure you are all aware of, we are making a series of decisions every day—I am sure it is true to say, Kath—around what we stop, what we start, what we carry on with. That is very difficult. That does not mean we will stop doing the things that matter to us. We will carry on with this work. But it becomes increasingly strained when we are talking about resources, and that means people as well as actual funds to carry out different things. I think you would probably agree with me, Kath.

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: Totally, and I am not going to repeat that. If you ask me what I am worried about, and whether we would be able to continue even in the way we are at the moment, I would say that if I look at the social make-up that is delivering in our region—particularly the East Midlands, but the two cities, Derby and Nottingham—we have much higher levels of non-attendance at school. That for me is quite a worry when we are talking about social mobility and access to higher education. We are starting to see significant increases in homeschooling through routes that I am quite anxious of, where if you fine a family, they decide the best thing is not to send their child to school and therefore to actually homeschool them.

The fundamental bit for me is how we are working with our region on tackling some really challenging things through research, through the information we can see. London managed to tackle this, and it is not being seen in London post Covid as much as it is in the regions. But in my region, the significant piece of work that we are really trying to tackle is: why are people not attending school? That is quite critical when it comes to social mobility and how successful my APP will be, actually, because there will not be as many young people we can even challenge to access higher education.

Lord Watts: You touched on the fact that it is easier if you live in Westminster to actually get into a higher-paid graduate job, and we are not surprised at that because that is where the activity is. How do you balance the need to encourage young people to take opportunities in London, for example—despite all the difficulties—against the brain drain? You are losing some of your most able people to the centre and leaving those regions without those abilities.

Professor Graeme Atherton: I agree, it is a big challenge. We look at the data, which shows that the majority of students when they leave university actually end up being employed in their own region. However, as you know, the data also shows a flow of students into London and its surrounding regions. To come back to the point we discussed earlier on, it is important to think about what higher education provision looks like across the country, what the nature of provision is in certain parts of the country where there is less provision, and how that is linked to labour markets, to create opportunities in local areas that enable people to believe they can remain perhaps where they want to remain, rather than flowing into London. That flow in and out is important.

We also see to some extent a flow of people into London in early career, perhaps coming out again in later career, but at the same time they are not necessarily going back into communities they came from. I am sure that those really are big issues, in terms of the broader future picture for access to higher education and social mobility.

Q19 Lord Johnson of Marylebone: Do you think we could be doing a better job of evaluating the effectiveness of all these different access initiatives? There is an incredible proliferation of these exercises. I understand there are 55 separate evaluation exercises into the OfS’s widening participation funding stream, and 24 different exercises looking at Uni Connect. I understand that at a very senior level at the OfS, they are not even being read because there are so many of them. What is going wrong here, in terms of how we are actually looking at the effectiveness of these schemes and at the cost of the current system of evaluation?

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: For me, evaluation is the most important thing that you do when you actually undertake interventions. If you looked at it from any scientific point of view, you would not really do an intervention to not understand if it has worked. I was just going to say, when Graeme was speaking then, that I worked in London most of my life before I went to the Midlands, and what I did in London would most certainly not work in Derby, without a shadow of a doubt. We actually cannot be having generic schemes. We can have generic approaches, we can have evidence that something worked in certain communities, but there are lots of things happening, and we could probably re-evaluate what the most important things that we should be doing are.

What I do not know is where all those things are. I am pretty specific at Derby on what we do, so the bit for me is that our APP is really important, and the evaluation of the impact of that APP is very important. I would be looking at that on a monthly basis. If we are saying there are thousands and thousands of initiatives, some people might just be doing those with no resource to evaluate. If the OfS is not reading my APP, I am pretty depressed. If it is not looking at the work that Derby is doing from a regional perspective, I am also pretty depressed. What I would then be saying is, “What is the point of the regulator, if I am regulated on something that actually they’re not even going to read?”

So I agree, if we are doing too many things, but we have to keep doing many things if we want to change the social fabric of our country and the economic vibrancy of the country. I could answer that yes, maybe we are asked to write up too many things, but actually we have to evaluate what we are doing, because otherwise it is either not value for money or we are not stopping anything even if it is just working. I just need you to tell me that you might challenge the OfS to read my APP and actually evaluate it.

Lord Johnson of Marylebone: It is not that they are not reading the APPs, because those are part of a process; it is that the OfS’s own widening participation funding stream is subject to 55 separate evaluations, none of which is actually being read by anybody. Similarly, Uni Connect’s widening participation activities are also subject to a huge number of different evaluations, all of which are not being read.

Professor Graeme Atherton: There was a strong narrative regarding Uni Connect and its predecessors, about how we know it is making an impact or not. OfS put a great emphasis on that. The pendulum has also swung in the other direction now. We have quite a strong body of evidence on Uni Connect now, but we have a proliferation of Uni Connect’s evaluation work. The money for Uni Connect has been reduced significantly over recent years, for various reasons; let us not get into that now. What it has meant, of course, is that once you have reduced the money for delivery, you have a strong evidence base, but you have gone so far to try to evaluate it even more and more that it has put more pressure on those delivering Uni Connect. A more focused approach would have probably realised the same level of evidence of impact.

Professor Liz Mossop: No one would argue with accountability. We have to be accountable for what we do—we are spending public money, so that is really important. At the same time, the level of bureaucracy and activity that sometimes is involved in that means that it gets more and more difficult to achieve, and if it is not having an impact, then it becomes fairly pointless. It is about finding a balance.

Professor Graeme Atherton: Exactly. There has to be a balance between delivery and evaluation.

Lord Evans of Rainow: Very quickly, Professor Mitchell, you said something quite profound then. You said that what works in London does not work in the regions. Could you just very quickly share that thought with an example?

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: I was in west London. If you look at deprivation in London, there is significant deprivation, but on every corner there is aspiration. That is very different, and I did not appreciate that, having spent 20 years in London. It is incredibly challenging, and some communities we had to work with were incredibly challenged, but there is a sense of opportunity just being in your capital city.

I live in a very small city, but many of my young people do not know we have a cathedral. That is quite worrying. People might not have ventured two miles across the city. You could not just say, “Oh, let’s all go to Westminster for the day and have a trip round”. The first time some of the young people came to Parliament was when Lord Ravensdale invited a whole group. I am telling you; we had to prep those young people. They were terrified of coming, and then someone asked a question first, and they were even more terrified. But actually, they were great. The bit for me is you have to think differently about what aspiration means in those communities, and what opportunities they have had before even entering an education system.

Professor Liz Mossop: Just to add to that, I would also say it is a classic example of where place-based working matters, is it not? We know our places, we know what works and what does not work. It is also about the political system. For us in South Yorkshire, our mayoral combined authority is really important, because our mayor understands the challenges of our region and the challenges in South Yorkshire. We can work more effectively and collaboratively with him, with the local authorities, with the other university in our city, with the FE colleges, and with our business and SMEs, and really drill down into what is going to make a difference in our region. Yes, it is really important.

Q20 The Bishop of Lincoln: Kath, it would be hard to ignore or not know about the Lincoln Cathedral, since so much of the county of Lincolnshire is below sea level. Kath, I was slightly sad to hear you talk about the East Midlands and not refer to Lincolnshire, which provides the bulk of the geography of the East Midlands, much of it rural and coastal. We were also hearing that it is rural areas where the social mobility seems to often operate at the lowest level.

You were talking about participation and the ecosystem of education, but what about the people who are non-participants—the young people who are not in education, employment, or training? I know obviously involvement with the opportunity and priority areas is very important in this whole challenge, but what is the place of the university in grappling with those who are non-participants in any way, and how do we break through to those young people who have no aspiration at all?

Professor Graeme Atherton: Universities are doing quite a lot of work with different groups of young people who would fall in the NEET category. First, the NEET category is quite diverse. When we think of NEETs generally, there is always an assumption that all young people who are NEETs have performed poorly at school, for instance. That is not the case; many have different forms of school experiences.

We have done quite a lot of work in the National Education Opportunities Network, which I used to lead. Annually, we would bring examples of our good practice together from our members, and over the years we have seen an increasing amount of work done by universities with care leavers and looked-after children; unfortunately, many fall into this category. Young carers are a group that many of our members have done quite a lot of work with as well. There are particular communities of students as well. Increasingly, in the last five or six years we have been involved through NEON in working with young people in the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community, where we know educational outcomes are not always the strongest.

There are also other forms of progression into higher education. Access courses, of course, are a route into higher education for learners who have often not had prior school qualifications. There are still over 30,000 students going into higher education through access courses every year. We are quite actively involved with this group, and through the broader work that universities do in terms of access and participation, it starts very early. It starts at primary school all the way through.

Regarding your point before about failure, et cetera, if you think about access work as well, we often talk about evaluation of success, but sometimes when we do our widening-access work with young people—even if they are not in the NEET group—they might not go into higher education and make that decision. That is also an important role we have to play in helping young people decide the right route for them, particularly when we do our widening-access work at younger levels. I would say, Bishop, we are involved in particular work with specific groups of students who fall in the NEET category.

Professor Liz Mossop: I can give a specific example in Lincolnshire, if you like, because I previously worked at the University of Lincoln.

The Chair: Do not get the idea that we are only interested in Lincolnshire. The Bishop would like us to talk exclusively about Lincolnshire.

Professor Liz Mossop: It is a very important county, very large. First, the focus in our outreach work there is absolutely on the rural and coastal bits of Lincolnshire. It is a huge county, and people do not realise the challenges of such a large space sometimes. One specific example I would give you would be the skills boot camps around the food sector, which are still very successfully run in south Lincolnshire. They are a really great way to get young people back into training through a free initiative, which then also gives them a job interview at the end of it, and they are a great way to work with employers. There is a specific example for you.

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: Finally, I apologise, but East Midlands Combined Authority has just set up and I am working with it. A large proportion of this is we have to start earlier, in that the primary work and many of the initiatives that our types of universities are now doing with primaries are really important.

I also want to just identify that a significant proportion of NEETs are young people with a disability, which might mean mental health. One of the big pieces of work I did with Lord Blunkett and Lord Norton was on Arriving at Thriving, which we chose as an aspirational project to reduce student graduate outcome gaps between students with a disability and non. We have reduced that at Derby, and that led to an increase in those people applying to the university, particularly at mature levels. There are things you can do, but we also need to see the real significance in the young people presenting with mental health in the NEET category.

Q21 Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath: Kathryn and Liz, in particular, you have both talked about a really strong sense of place for your organisations. I know that Professor Atherton, you also have mentioned it when you were in west London. Sorry, Professor Mitchell and Professor Mossop, one of you mentioned the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority and the new—as I understand it—East Midlands Combined Authority. What role do you think local authorities play with you, and is it positive? How much do they feature in your life around this particular agenda? Whether it is the macro or whether it is the individual local authorities, I would be interested to hear that.

Professor Liz Mossop: I am happy to kick off that one. A huge amount—that is the short answer. We in Sheffield work extremely collaboratively across the different organisations on big-picture issues, but also on smaller challenges. The programme I talked about is one example of that, where the two universities have come together with the combined authority and with the local authorities to work on projects. There are also often crossovers, so you might be aware of the project in Barnsley around Pathways to Work, which is specifically about getting people back into work and ready for work.

As a university we have an Advanced Wellbeing Research Centre, which is very closely linked to the mayoral combined authority, and that well-being research centre will be feeding into that project. We talk about Sheffield as a village quite often because we are all very closely linked on lots of different projects. Of course, strategically we all look at what our combined authority wants to achieve—its strapline is “Good growth”—and then we all think about how we work together to do that. Yes, it is it is it is a huge part of what I do on a day-to-day basis.

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: Yes, what I will say will be very similar. The only challenge I faced originally when we did the Opportunity Area was the relationship between MATs and local authority schools, and how they started to work together. We seem to have totally overcome that now. EMCCA has just started, I am an associate member on that board for HE and FE, and it has a piece on inclusive growth that has to understand everything we are talking about here in order to be successful. I am optimistic that we could work even better. The concern I have is we do not want to reinvent the wheel again. There is a lot of evidence in our region on what could be successful, and so actually trying to make sure the evidence is getting into a new organisation is really important.

Q22 Baroness Hussein-Ece: I was going to go from local government to central government. I wanted to ask, do you think there is enough work or engagement with central government and educational institutions in order to influence policies to enhance social mobility? Do you think enough is being done, or not enough? If you have some examples that would be very helpful.

Professor Graeme Atherton: At the National Educational Opportunities Network, which has been going for 13 years, we have produced an extensive amount of evidence and research, which we disseminated within this building, in the Lords and the Commons. We have worked with Sue quite extensively over the years as well. We have a strong relationship in terms of trying to form and shape this area of policy, but certainly more can be done.

If you think about higher education as a sector, the various mission groups are very important—the representative organisations. We know that our university, Sheffield Hallam and Derby are all members of those groups. It is really important that those groups have an active dialogue with central government, in this area of social mobility, equity and access. There is also a national organisation for universities, Universities UK, that prioritises this area of work as well because it is the national voice for universities.

There are entry routes into policymakers that we have found, but it is an ongoing piece of work. The Department for Education, of course, has the overall remit for this area of work, and it has been open to discussions about the research we have produced on widening access to social mobility. We need to see that going through to affecting policy as well. There is a lot of expertise in the field, a lot of commitment in this space, not just in research but in practice as well. Any work going forward particularly has to make sure it is cognisant of that.

We have worked with the Office for Students as well. The OfS seemed more open to these discussions before. The model of the OfS, where you have a director for fair access and participation, is an interesting one. It probably puts a lot of potential sway and power on one particular postholder. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the postholder in place. I am not saying the postholder we have is not a good postholder, but that model is important to think about as well. In that policy work going forward, it is important that we have the ability to really engage with those organisations like NEON, and other organisations and individual universities that really have expertise, knowledge and commitment, both in terms of practice and research base. That shapes the work that goes on. Has it happened recently? It has to a degree. I would argue it could happen more.

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: It has improved over my period of being a vice-chancellor, and we have had more access to central government. My request would always be to listen carefully to the breadth of the evidence because central government is sometimes quickly swayed by an initiative, and there is a breadth of evidence that understands the difference between London and the regions. We have a lot of that evidence, but sometimes policies are driven by only one element. That would be my request.

Lord Evans of Rainow: Designed in Whitehall, in London.

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: Yes.

Professor Liz Mossop: I was just going to highlight the role of the regulator in all this. As we learned earlier, the regulator is collecting a huge amount of information from us, and actually, the expectation of where that information goes and what influence that has on policy is really important as well. We cannot underestimate that.

Baroness Hussein-Ece: My supplementary really was that Kath mentioned that the Government like initiatives, but I was wondering how much of it is mainstream, the notion of and the commitment to social mobility. Are you feeling it is across the piece or is it just on initiatives here and there?

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: I am sitting next to somebody who has spent their whole life really trying to influence. Graeme and I worked a lot together in London, and I was able to take the learnings from how Graeme worked in London outside the region. We have to look at it through an ecosystem, going from primary school to actually getting access into higher education, improving outcomes and upskilling our population, which is critical for me. Sometimes we see it in this very narrow way: are you a university about social mobility? Well, we should all be universities about social mobility. We should give Graeme the floor.

Professor Graeme Atherton: The role of the commission for social mobility is an interesting one as well, and where that is going. It has changed its nature, its membership, and its remit over the years. That was the organisation that was meant to hold the feet of government to the fire, as Alan Milburn said when that was settled 13 years ago. Has it been doing that? That is an important thing for the committee to think about. Again, the profile of social mobility and the arguments around what it means are an important debate to start off with. It is a really important debate. It is a dynamic concept; it is not a static concept. Has that moved forward in recent years? It has probably stalled a little, if I was being really honest, from our experiences.

Like Kath said, we need to look within the sector as well. The universities here are proud of the work that we do on social mobility—we are proud to be identified in that area, but again, that has to be the case across all our sector. Maybe it differs in ways across our sector as well. Yes, there is some work to be done. This committee has a really important role to play to re-energise some of those debates, if I am being honest, because it has stalled a little. I am really welcoming that you have taken the initiative to do that.

Lord Young of Cookham: I have a quick follow-up question on the role of central government. The university sector is under enormous financial pressure at the moment. Might any of the economies you have to make impact on the work you are doing on social mobility?

Professor Liz Mossop: It is so central to what we do that we cannot let that happen. That would be my view on that. But of course, as I said earlier, we are making decisions every day about what we do, what we do not do, and what we have to stop, because we are financially in very difficult times. It is central to the core DNA of my institution at Sheffield Hallam; that is what we do. We are there to transform lives and give opportunities to people who otherwise may not have had those opportunities. It is important we do the work to enable people to see those opportunities and all the other work we do across the city and the region. But we are having to make some difficult decisions, and there is no hiding behind that.

Q23 Lord Watts: Have you anything you would like to say to the committee that you have not said, or you would like to say before the committee considers its report? Do you have any recommendations that you would like to make that we might want to adopt?

Professor Graeme Atherton: As I mentioned earlier on, particularly regarding the role of the commission for social mobility, we should consider what that future of such an organisation is. If it is going to drive social mobility across departments, what does that look like? On specific issues we have not discussed today, the role of the applied general qualification is really important. We know that T-Levels are a strong qualification, but students taking applied general qualifications are disproportionately represented among those from widening-access backgrounds. It is a route into higher education for those from widening-access backgrounds, alongside A-levels. NEON and other university partners have quite openly argued for the importance of applied general qualifications. To me, if you start changing that, do it very carefully, otherwise you will affect progression into higher education as well.

The focus on understanding opportunities across different areas is also important. There are some really strong areas where you understand opportunities, such as Derby, Sheffield, and London to an extent. There are areas where we do not, and we need to understand what those areas look like. There are some parts of the country where we do not really understand the opportunities or the ecosystem there. The committee can make a real contribution to understanding that a little better.

Finally, for me, that focus on particularly rural and coastal areas is really important. Our data shows that there are some areas there of real challenge and need—not that there is not in London; London has its own specific areas of need as well, but we should really think about those areas where the data shows that the progression is related to higher education.

The Chair: I want the two other panel members to know that if you go away and think of some further answers to Lord Watts’s question about what you would like to see in our final recommendations, you are very welcome to do that.

Lord Hampton: I would just like a clarification from Professor Atherton. You mentioned really important applied general qualifications. Could you just explain that?

Professor Graeme Atherton: Applied general qualifications are often under the BTEC banner. They are qualifications that combine a level of academic and vocational learning.

Lord Evans of Rainow: Graeme, something you just said struck me. As I wrote it down, you said it. This committee needs to do some recommendations, and we want to get the biggest impact—the biggest bang for our buck, as it were. We have the answer on the data and how we have data gaps on this, but you said something about Derby, London and various other cities where you understand the socioeconomic background.

My question is about whether it is possible to come up with a template that you put into a town; it could be a seaside town or it could be a Midlands town. All towns will be different, but there will be the same issues in there of a greater or lesser degree; what I usually refer to as same meat, different gravy. The gravy is the different peculiarities of that seaside town or that Midlands town. Is there such a template that you can take to a town that you do not know, and you place it on, and using the latest data and artificial intelligence, immediately that artificial intelligence tells you where you need to focus, and the things that are different in this seaside town? Is there such a template that could be utilised, or does it need inventing?

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: I was going to add one thing about how when this committee is looking at data, there is theoretical data that will tell you what has worked in an RCT, for example, and that is very important. You also need to look at the practice-based data, where things have actually worked across with different regional impacts. If you wanted a template, to a certain extent, that would give you a richer template, because some of our practice-based outcomes do not seem as impactful when we are looking at the pure research element.

The Chair: I noticed that our next witnesses in the back row, who are going to give us the results of their research, are nodding on those comments. We will hope to carry that on.

Lord Evans of Rainow: I segued into the next meeting with that. I come from the manufacturing industry, where that is called best practice. You have an industry standard. You take that best practice industry standard based on what you know works. Graeme, the areas where you said you do not know the towns and the peculiarities, could you take all that knowledge using artificial intelligence, place it on the town, and based on those experiences, come up with a solution? It is a bit like a surgeon trying to diagnose the patient’s issues.

Professor Kathryn Mitchell: It would be better than nothing, that is what I would say.

Professor Graeme Atherton: It is a conceivable concept, and certainly we know about the dynamics and ecosystems and what they look like in various places. I agree that you possibly could go to certain places and understand much more about their ecosystems, or indeed where the gaps and opportunities are. It is a good way forward, potentially.

The Chair: You can hear that we actually have a string of further questions. We may need to send you some, if you will forgive us. That is because your evidence session has been so interesting, and we are very grateful to you. Thank you all very much.