Written evidence from UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities (SMP0017)

This submission is written by Professor Lindsey Macmillan, Professor Gill Wyness, Dr Laura Outhwaite, and Dr Paul Martin, on behalf of the UCL Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities. We are submitting evidence to this inquiry given our expertise in this area. Our research aims to inform and design policy and practice to equalise opportunities throughout life from early years through to the labour market. Professor Macmillan serves on the DWP Labour Market Advisory Board and DfE’s Opportunities Mission Expert Reference Group and has contributed extensively to the literature on social mobility in the UK for the past 20 years.

 

Definitions and Data

  1. There are various ways in which social mobility, the relationship between incomes across generations, can be measured. If we think of the relative incomes of parents and their adult children as two generations lined up on parallel ladders, the intergenerational elasticity (IGE) captures both the ordering of parents and their adult children on the rungs of the ladders and the space between each rung of the ladder for each generation (the inequality in each generation). An alternative measure, the rank-rank association which is now more commonly used in the literature, only captures the ordering of parents and their adult children, keeping the space between each rung of the ladder constant. Comparing the two metrics then tells us how much of the persistence in incomes across generations is driven by changes in inequalities across generations and how much is driven by the re-ordering of parents and children across generations (Gregg et al., 2017). 
  2. An advantage of using continuous metrics that capture the associations between incomes across the entire distribution, rather than for example the upward movement of those from the bottom quintile of the income distribution, is that they are not subject to threshold effects. Metrics such as the upward movement of those from the bottom quintile to the top quintile are simple and easy to understand but they miss movements in all other parts of the distribution. For example, the upward mobility measure captures the movement of the person at the 20th percentile but says nothing about the movement of the person at the 21st percentile. This can have unintended policy consequences, missing out on groups of people who may also need intervention. 
  3. Crucially, the continuous metrics, while measuring social immobility, are more aligned with the concept of equalising opportunities. A weakening of the association between parental income and child adult outcomes will indicate an equalisation of life chances and opportunities for children from all different backgrounds. This is our preferred view of social mobility, through this broad lens of offering equal opportunities throughout childhood and life to all, regardless of background.
  4. There has been a broad literature that illustrates how Britain fairs poorly in terms of both intergenerational income mobility across countries and over time. The research shows that the UK is one of the least mobile countries in the developed world (Jerrim and Macmillan, 2015), rivalling only the US with the highest levels of income persistence across generations, or unequal opportunities. Estimates from UK cohort studies find that for a cohort born in 1970, up to half of the differences in incomes of parents are passed across generations into income differences between sons (Gregg et al., 2017). There is also evidence that intergenerational income mobility declined over time in the UK for the cohort born in 1970 relative to a cohort born 12 years earlier in 1958 (Blanden et al., 2005, Blanden et al., 2007). 
  5. Our work using cohort studies showed that an increase in the relationship between family income and educational attainment was a key driver of the decline in mobility over time in the UK (Blanden et al., 2007). More recent work using linked administrative data for cohorts born in the mid to late 1980s has shown that there are large differences in income mobility by place within England, and by gender and ethnicity (van der Erve et al., 2024.) While education is an important driver of immobility everywhere, it is differences beyond education in the labour market that account for differences across places in England (Carneiro et al., 2020) and across countries (Gregg et al., 2017). Government should therefore prioritise a joined-up approach of reducing educational inequalities in school and ensuring that young people leaving education have both the skills required and opportunities in the labour market.
  6. There is work underway to improve the administrative data linkages to ensure that we are able to observe parental income in childhood in the data. This work is absolutely crucial for a range of policy questions and would move us from a threshold fixation (pupil premium or free school meal eligibility) to a more nuanced policy picture of where to target interventions both within the education system and beyond. It would also allow us to measure social immobility, or equality of opportunities more effectively across place, time, gender, ethnicity, and other characteristics available in the administrative data records.

 

University initiatives

  1. Universities implement a range of initiatives to encourage applications from candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds. The three main strategies used by universities in this area are: The delivery of widening participation outreach programmes; the implementation of ‘contextual admissions’ policies; the provision of financial support.
  2. Universities deliver a range of outreach programmes designed to support people from disadvantaged backgrounds to access higher education. Expenditure by higher education providers on outreach programmes is considerable. Figures reported to the Office for Students by higher education providers in England show that the total estimated spend on access initiatives (excluding financial support such as bursaries) between 2020 and 2025 is in excess of £1 billion (Office for Students, 2020). A number of literature reviews have considered the overall effectiveness of widening participation outreach programmes (e.g. Younger et al., 2019; Robinson & Salvestrini, 2020). The broad consensus of these different reviews is that whilst outreach programmes show signs of promise, programmes are often not evaluated to a high enough standard to determine whether they have a causal effect.
  3. Many universities implement ‘contextual admissions’ policies where disadvantaged applicants may be offered certain concessions in the admissions process, such as a lower entry requirement (Boliver, et al., 2021). Disadvantaged applicants can be flagged as contextual for several possible reasons, such as being in receipt of free school meals, attending an underperforming school, living in a disadvantaged neighbourhood or having taken part in a university outreach programme (Boliver et al., 2017). There is no consistency in the application of contextual admissions policies across different universities. This can lead to potential confusion among applicants.
  4.                     Whilst contextual admissions policies may help in supporting disadvantaged applicants to access university, some analyses have suggested that they may be based on a questionable premise that there exists a large pool of disadvantaged applicants who only narrowly miss out on university entry requirements (Boliver et al., 2021; Turhan & Stevens, 2020). University admissions departments may be reluctant to reduce grades by much for fear that letting in lower achieving students may result in an increase in dropout rates and degree attainment. Research on the extent to which this is true is rare, though at least one study has shown that those entering with lower grades are less likely to achieve a good degree (Boliver et al, 2019). On the other hand, studies (Lasselle et al, 2014; Crawford et al, 2016; HEFCE, 2016) have shown that students who secure high grades in a relatively disadvantaged school environment are relatively better equipped in terms of motivation and ability to perform well at university than students who achieved the same grades in a more favourable school context.
  5.                     Figures reported to the Office for Students by HE providers in England show that these providers expect to provide over £1.6 billion in financial support for students between 2020 and 2025 (Office for Students, 2020). This support is expected to take the form of bursaries and scholarships, tuition fee waivers and hardship funds. Evidence suggests that providing disadvantaged students with money whilst they are at university is preferable to a policy of reducing or abolishing tuition fees. Increases in university tuition fees over time have not coincided with a reduction in the number of disadvantaged students attending university (Crawford et al., 2016). This is likely to be due to the reassurances provided by England’s income-contingent student loan repayment system (Murphy et al., 2019). Meanwhile, some evidence suggests that non-repayable financial support can incentivise HE participation (Dearden, 2014). There is also evidence that financial support that is intended to support students while at university is beneficial in terms of improving completion and performance throughout the course Wyness and Murphy, (2023).
  6.                     Whist the three strategies mentioned above may have some potential to reduce socioeconomic disparities in access to HE, it should also be noted that the headline statistics suggest that recent progress overall in this area has been limited (Martin, 2024b). It should also be noted that the failure of the financial support system to keep up with inflation has been raised as a concern by many (Murphy and Wyness, 2024; Ogden and Waltman, 2024). The abolition of maintenance grants in 2016, and falling real values of maintenance loans over the past few years have meant that higher education is no longer “free at point of use” - seen as critical for access (Murphy et al, 2019) - creating difficulties for students who do not have access to parental financial support.
  7.                     ‘First in family’ is an important barrier to university participation and graduation and has strong predictive power compared to other sources of disadvantage (Adamecz-Volgi et al, 2020). This research shows that the disadvantage from being first in family arises through early educational attainment. This suggests such students would benefit from contextualised university admissions. 
  8.                     University applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds may benefit from additional support in navigating the HE applications and admissions process. Research suggests that applicants from poorer households are more likely to undermatch, enrolling in less selective courses than those from more advantaged households, even when they have similar entry grades (Campbell et al, 2022). New ongoing work suggests this is driven by applications, rather than because these applicants are rejected – i.e. low SES students make less aspirational applications, even when their examination grades are equally as good as their more advantaged counterparts. Advisors in schools and colleges should therefore ensure that disadvantaged applicants are being sufficiently ambitious when selecting (up to) 5 choices in their UCAS applications. Disadvantaged applicants may also benefit from additional support in putting together their personal statement, since research has suggested that these students may find themselves with a narrower range of different extra-curricular experiences to draw upon (Jones, 2013). The recent changes made to the personal statement (mainly condensing it into a series of “closed” questions) are unlikely to improve this situation much (Kelly and Wyness, 2023).
  9.                     Whilst at university, disadvantaged students may require additional support. For example: Disadvantaged students may be more likely to enter university with “non-traditional” qualifications such as BTECs, rather than A levels. Research shows that students with these qualifications perform slightly worse at university (Dilnot, Macmillan and Wyness, 2023), suggesting these nontraditional students may require additional support throughout their studies. Disadvantaged students are more likely to remain living in their family home and commute to university from day to day (Donnelly & Gamsu, 2018). They therefore may require additional support to assimilate within student communities. Survey data shows that students from poorer households receive less financial support from their parents and in some cases even use part of their student maintenance loans to contribute to their family’s household finances (Department for Education, 2023). Poorer students have been particularly exposed to the recent real-terms reductions in the value of student maintenance loans, given that recent increases in them have not kept pace with inflation (Ogden & Waltmann, 2023; Murphy and Wyness, 2024;), and since the abolition of grants in 2016. Universities should therefore be mindful of the fact that disadvantaged students may be more reliant on undertaking paid employment during study (ONS, 2023), and as such will have less time to dedicate to their studies and less time outside of term time to undertake unpaid internships to support with their future career development plans.

 

Employer initiatives

  1.                     Research (Macmillan, Murphy and Wyness, 2024) suggests that students from low SES backgrounds are less likely to enter high qualification, and high wage occupations than those from high SES backgrounds, even when they are similarly qualified. These gaps cannot be explained by prior attainment, experience, noncognitive factors such as academic self-confidence, or a range of measures of occupational preferences. New research (Dilnot, Macmillan and Tyler, 2024) using unique application data suggests that, at least among large professional employers, low SES graduates do apply to these jobs but are less successful in the application/interview process. Working class applicants are 32% less likely to get an offer to a graduate training programme than an applicant from a professional background, and even when comparing applicants who look similar on paper, working class applicants are still 18% less likely to receive and offer. This suggests that the focus should be on employers to adjust their recruitment practices to take this into account, rather than further outreach work.
  2.                     Importantly, half of the socio-economic gap in offers to graduate training programmes occur at the online phase of the process, during application sifts and online testing, while the other half occur at the face-to-face phase of recruitment. Employers should consider whether their online tests are capturing potential or screening out talent. They should also consider why applicants from different backgrounds with similar prior attainment who pass online testing still have significantly different offer rates when they reach the face-to-face phase. Universities could play an important role in preparing students from disadvantaged backgrounds more for recruitment processes, including preparation for online testing, and emphasising the importance of early applications to graduate training programmes.
  3.                     This research also highlights that larger employers are collecting information on the socio-economic background of applicants now, including questions on parental occupation of the main earner when the applicant was 14, the type of school that the applicant attended, eligibility for free school meals at school, and the highest education qualification of parents of the applicant. The parental occupation and school type questions were asked by all large employers in the sample, while free school meal eligibility and highest education qualification were asked by half of the participating employers. These questions are typically asked in the ‘Equal Opportunties’ sections of applications alongside other protected characteristics and response rates to these questions are upward of 80% from applicants.

 

NEETs

  1.                     Headline statistics related to the youth (age 16 – 24) labour market remain significantly worse than they were before the pandemic, and worse than for the wider labour market. Around 10% of 24- and 25-year-olds now report having never worked, an increase of over 30% since the early 2000s. Given the extensive evidence on the longer-term impacts in terms of labour market scarring (Gregg, 2001, Gregg and Tominey, 2005) this is an immediate concern.
  2.                     This is not only a demand-side problem. The number of young people who are some distance from the labour market has increased over the past decade. For example, the proportion of young people claiming health-related incapacity benefit has increased five-fold since 2013 and around one in five young NEET people are in receipt of out-of-work health-related benefits. A combination of an increase in SEND need and mental health issues among young people (pre-dating the pandemic), and lower skill levels as a result of school closures and a large increase in persistent absences has contributed to this issue. Evidence shows that over 2 in 5 young people now report high levels of psychological distress, rising from 35% in 2017 and 23% in 2007.Similarly the number of school pupils with Education and Health Care plans has risen by 71% since 2018, in line with global trends. While the reasons for these increased needs are less well understood, there is some evidence that points to a causal link between the increased use of social media and young people’s deteriorating mental health (Cooley Fruehwirth et al., 2024). A recent report from the Education Policy Institute found an increase in the attainment gap between those from more and less disadvantaged backgrounds since 2019, and that this can be entirely explained by increasing absence levels for disadvantaged pupils.
  3.                     Schools have an important role to play in focusing more on the employability of young people. The risk of NEET indicators (RONIs) literature highlights that it is possible to predict with high degrees of accuracy those young people in the education system who are most at risk of becoming NEET. Targeted programmes in schools to support young people most at risk of this could reduce flows into this in future. There is also an important role of government to implement a youth strategy to deal with the challenges now faced in the youth labour market. Previous policies in this space have been in response to demand shocks caused by recessions, but these will not be appropriate for the current challenges in the youth labour market. Employers need to be incentivised to hire and train young people. As discussed in our Policy Priorities report, one potential option is ring-fencing of the Growth and Skills Levy for level 3 qualifications aimed at young people, rather than funding level 7 qualifications for existing employees. A human capital tax credit could incentivise employers to invest in upskilling employees, accounting for the inherent risk of those employees taking that human capital investment with them when leaving the firm.

25 April 2025