This page contains a transcript of the keynote speech delivered by Alun Francis, Chair of the Social Mobility Commission, delivered at the Royal Society of Arts on 4 June 2025. You can also watch a recording of the speech, including the post-speech Q&A, below.
Check against delivery.
I have come to London to talk to you about social mobility, and I’m going to be a little provocative. I’m going to say that actually, there is a model for social mobility, one that works well in London. But that’s your model, and it doesn’t work for the rest of us. I’ll set out why we think that’s the case.
I’ll also speak about some of the work we’re doing in Blackpool around our Multiversity. I’m going to talk to you about whether education really is the magic bullet. I think it is in London more so than other places, and London is the one place where bottom to top social mobility is probably the easiest.
However, it isn’t the same in other places. Look at poverty. I’m not saying it’s easy to be poor anywhere. But if you’re going to be poor, London is the best place to be poor. If you’re going to be poor and want a route through education, London offers the best opportunities in that respect.
But that’s not true for the rest of the country. And I’m going to argue that actually, if we want a model that recognises the differences across the country, we need to shift away from focusing just on education, we need to focus on the economy, but not just the economy. We need to focus on an innovative economy, because without innovation, we don’t have growth.
It’s not enough to have just any growth, it’s the type of growth that is important. Because if we get that type of growth right, if it’s innovative, we will get social mobility as a consequence of that. In fact, the two become almost the same thing. We get disruptive innovators, disrupting elites. We get those new businesses and those new sectors growing, and we get them lifting those at the bottom.
Those two things are not happening now. And that’s partly because we haven’t really understood that centrality about how the economy should be doing the heavy lifting around social mobility. Within that context, education currently can’t always play its role. And there are important regional considerations to this.
I’m going to come back at the end to talk about some of the solutions we think there are – around place-based work, on having a long term view, and I’ll touch on some things that I think are important – inequality, competition and education.
It’s a big honor for me to be here. As you know, I’m Chair of the Commission and Chief Executive of Blackpool and Fylde College. And there’s an affinity between the Commission’s work, my work in further education and the work of the RSA.
The RSA was founded in 1754 by William Shipley, just at the time the Industrial Revolution was accelerating. He had the foresight to harness some of the most forward thinking, adventurous ideas of the day, and built the RSA around the principles of promoting innovation, and the application of practical knowledge to improve society.
Those are principles that we see as being at the heart of what we do, and in encouraging solutions to economic problems. So, it feels very appropriate that we are having this conversation in this venue. The affinities are even stronger when we consider recent achievements of the RSA under Andy Haldane’s leadership. Since 2021, he’s reinvigorated that original vision, making it very much relevant to the country’s current challenges.
That’s something, again, which I feel we do at my college, but also something that we’ve been trying to do in the Social Mobility Commission in recent times. To give you an example of Andy’s thinking in this space, the things that he’s strongly emphasised have been the importance of interpersonal and technical skills, cross-disciplinary activity, and the notion of lifelong learning.
And he invented a new term, one that you may not have heard of, Multiversity, to describe the kind of skill system that we need. The idea being, if you contrast a university, with the one route in, with the Multiversity, multiple flexible routes offering different people, different ways of acquiring higher skills, that probably encapsulates the difference between those two models. And in my day job at Blackpool and The Fylde College, we are quite literally bringing to life the idea of the Multiversity.
So in partnership with local stakeholders, employers, Blackpool Council and with the support of Government funding, we’re building a £65 million high skill center right in the middle of Blackpool. It will offer apprenticeships and classroom qualifications of all kinds from level four.
Some courses will be foundation degrees, which are two years, some are three year degrees, and some are one year programs. And there will be other more flexible qualifications alongside that too. Building starts this autumn.
And I think the Multiversity is a very appropriate starting point for this talk, because it really gives us a window into this question about social mobility and the economy. And from that starting point, I’d like to get into more detail by asking two important questions. The first is: Are education and skills the silver bullet for social mobility?’
And is it education or the economy that really does the heavy lifting around social mobility? I’m going to argue that the primary issue lies with the economy for the majority of the country, and that to improve social mobility for all, rather than the lucky few, what we need most of all are place-based strategies for innovation and growth. Ones based on making markets and competition work better.
That’s quite a different approach to the conventional view of social mobility and possibly quite a challenging view for many. So are education and skills the silver bullet? We often hear this said. I can think of at least 2 or 3 prime ministers that have said that recently. But if we turn to Blackpool and the Multiversity, the answer is not really, not completely.
The Multiversity is a partial corrective to the dominant model of social mobility. It really does offer alternatives to the three year residential degree and gives second chances to those who follow a different route. Some of those are people that did well at 16 or 18, but did not follow it through at that age. They waited and they came back at a later time.
Or, those people whose education in school just didn’t work out very well, and they’ve got back into learning later in life. The typical student for us is in their 20s. They’re often working. They’ve often got families. And they may have very variable histories in terms of their past education.
The common thing is none of them fit that conventional model. And yet all of them need those opportunities to fulfill their potential and make their contribution. They include those who can’t or don’t want to leave the place they were born and raised in. They don’t necessarily want to follow that kind of traditional trajectory. The Multiversity caters for them, but it also contributes more than that.
It contributes to the ‘place’ as well, which is something we are very interested in at the Commission. Our current work is raising some really interesting questions about what people value in terms of social mobility and this is emerging from a range of projects that we’re doing.
And what’s emerging is that people often think about social mobility in very different ways to policymakers. They make, for example, a link between their individual narrative of opportunity and the place they belong to. That’s perhaps something in London people don’t need to think about too greatly, because the link is fairly obvious.
But outside of London, that’s not the case. And that is an important reminder that social mobility is a value. It’s about culture. It’s about belief. It’s about attitude. It’s not just a technical thing. It’s not just about the data. It’s not just about what the economic aspect tells us. And actually, we see very little in the policy literature that recognises this fact about social mobility and the way in which people think about it.
Our research has shown that where places are doing well, people speak with a very positive outlook, a sense of belonging and a brighter sense of their own and others’ opportunity. But when places aren’t flourishing and when they don’t seem to have a plan for how to get there, the tone is very different. And this shouldn’t come as a great surprise.
Anyone who has their eyes open and has gone around the country, particularly to coastal towns or to post-industrial places, will see just how local people are concerned about the decline of their places. It’s hard not to be moved when you hear people describe the decline of their hometowns, the decline of civic standards, the closure of their football clubs, the loss of amenities, the breakdown of community, the sense of low trust, the sense of feeling unsafe.
These are all characteristic features of the kind of things people talk about when they talk about their place, and they feel frustrated and sad that their place is not doing well. Now some leave to try to better their prospects elsewhere. And many come to London and if not to London, to other big metropolitan university cities. But some stay because they have no choice.
And then there are those who feel that their future is tied to the place, even though they could leave, they don’t want to. They want to stay where there’s family, there’s community, and what they do is they hope that the place will improve so they will be able to make their contribution. In that respect, you’ll very often find those people have followed the educational route, they’re working in fairly well-paid jobs. They’re in the public rather than the private sector, because there’s just not a very big private sector to be part of.
But you will also find others who just have no other opportunity. There is no other way out. So our multiversity contributes to helping all of those people. It also helps in terms of place-based mobility, because it’s part of a very ambitious regeneration project which is changing the town center.
Blackpool’s history is visible to anyone who visits the town. All the way along the promenade, we have the hotels and amusements. Just behind those we have what used to be the guest houses from the days when the tourist industry was very strong. Many of those guest houses have become houses in multiple-occupation. They are now often homes to people who relocate to Blackpool and are dependent on welfare.
The property is cheap. They’re bought by absentee landlords who make their money through housing benefit, through our public welfare system. These are landlords who very rarely visit. They never do repairs. I have to tell you that we’re knocking down two entire streets of some of the worst housing that I’ve ever seen in my life to build the Multiversity.
It’s shocking that there is housing of that quality in this country. So when we talk about place, the Multiversity is doing two things. It’s giving opportunities through education, but it’s also physically changing that neighborhood.
The local authority is building houses to rehouse those people in better quality accommodation, but it’s part of a program of improving the center of the town. And we’re one of a number of projects that are part of that. That’s important because creating better civic institutions, especially ones which offer transformation through learning, is key to bringing back that local pride and a local sense of purpose.
But whilst we will be making a big contribution, and will be an important part of that jigsaw puzzle, the Multiversity and the college’s work are not enough on their own. That’s for two reasons. First, the key driver for opportunity is not education in itself, but it is the economy. And that’s been the case for social mobility, right the way through the 20th and into the 21st century.
The one thing that has fundamentally driven opportunity to move from one occupational class to another, and which has improved income, has been the changing economic structure. The fact we’ve shifted from an economy that was predominantly manufacturing to one that’s predominantly services. And that has allowed lots of people to change their occupational status. They have acquired what we now call professional jobs, the traditional working class is much, much smaller than it was 100 years ago.
The professional class is much, much bigger. And that is also part of our challenge around social mobility. It’s important that we really acknowledge it is the economy that drives those opportunities, and that in this country we have some very big geographical differences in the spread of those opportunities in different places. Beyond London, and even more so outside the major university cities in post-industrial towns, the coastal areas that I’ve talked about, there are just not enough highly paid jobs to sustain the whole community. And you can see this in our recent State of the Nation reports and our Data Explorer tool on the Social Mobility Commission website.
So that’s the first reason. The second reason is that in those ‘left behind’ places, we have some extraordinary concentrations of very disadvantaged people. And this is partly about money, but disadvantage is always much broader than that. So we tend to find overlapping issues of health, low skills, low qualifications, poorly paid work and little to no engagement with the labour market, and a set of cultural issues that sit alongside that.
They all sit together, they overlap, and they mutually reinforce each other. I recently wrote about some of this in an article about welfare and the extent to which our welfare system should be a trampoline around social mobility, but actually it isn’t. Once you’re in it, you can become stuck. And it can be very difficult to move out of that.
Now, there are some positive trends and changes and trends over the last 10 or 20 years. For example, in terms of socio-economic background, the gap in university enrollment between 2014 and 2022 has narrowed. In 2014, young people from higher professional backgrounds were 3.9 times more likely to be studying for a degree than those from lower working class backgrounds. But by 2022, that had reduced to 2.2 times. That’s a very big change in the short space of time, and that’s one indicator of many things that have got better. So we don’t want people to go away and say it’s all doom and gloom, because that’s not true.
But despite considerable improvements in educational outcomes over the last 20 years, including for poor and working class families, there is a whole cohort of people who remain in very dire straits. These are the people we are calling the ‘truly disadvantaged’, and they get lost in a lot of the work around social mobility, where people tend to see the disadvantaged as an amorphous group. Rather, within the disadvantaged group, there are some with serious levels of disadvantage, while others are less severely affected.
On our second theme – ‘which does the heavy lifting – Education or the economy?’ Very often a major characteristic of ‘left behind’ places is the weakness of the private sector. That is a common theme wherever you look. If you go to Hartlepool, or Oldham, Blackpool, or Rochdale, Sunderland, to a lot of parts of the West Midlands… if you go to coastal areas in particular, you’ll find some real challenges around the role and size of the private sector. And it’s the economy, particularly private sector growth, that gives the context and vibrancy in which education can play its positive role. The absence of a strong economy is a characteristic feeling of being left behind. Now, you wouldn’t think this is the case if you read much of social mobility policy over the last 10 to 15 years.
It tends to talk about education. It tends to talk about early years. And we’re not saying those are not important. But what we are saying is, while the economy sometimes gets mentioned, it’s not placed center stage. That needs to change – now, when we look at social mobility across the country, it absolutely has to be right at the center of our thinking.
It is the economy that does that heavy lifting, and is also the source of many of the obstacles and impediments to social mobility that we see around us. Our economy is focused on clusters around specialist strengths, particularly in London. But what drives that around the country? What makes our country so geographically, economically uneven?
And is that normal? Is that how it is everywhere or is that a particular feature of the United Kingdom? Can it be changed? And is that how an innovative economy is actually meant to work? Do we have a problem around innovation? And is this connected to our social mobility challenges?
Let’s explore some of those questions in a bit more detail. How typical is the UK? Well, it’s important to ask why our economy works like this. And is it normal? Last summer the SMC explored some of these issues in a think piece that we published on spatial agglomeration. That’s the technical phrase that economists use for the fact that economic opportunities cluster in particular places.
There are some very good reasons why that happens. We’re not suggesting that somehow this model needs to change. Economic clustering happens, particularly in urban centers, because it can drive productivity and innovation. It leads to improved economic growth. It brings all kinds of benefits and challenges, particularly, around productivity and innovation, but also around heightened inequality and the kind of disparities we’ve talked about.
And in terms of the level of regional disparities in this country, it’s absolutely normal that there will be a city or cities in any given country that is ahead of others. But the gap in this country between London and everywhere else is much bigger than it would be in other places. So the answer is “yes and no” as to whether this is typical.
It’s typical to have agglomeration, but it’s not typical to have such extremes, extremes like the ones we have in London and elsewhere. More recently, perhaps in Manchester and Edinburgh, we can see them starting to close the gap – Manchester, is the only one closing the gap in terms of GDP. But Edinburgh is also closing the gap in terms of opportunities around professional employment, but they’re just not doing that quickly enough.
London is so far ahead we are quite an atypical country. To illustrate this, I take you back to an anecdote from the early days of devolution, when I was working in Greater Manchester. I remember when Howard Bernstein and his team came back from a meeting with George Osborne when they brokered a deal. They put a graph on the wall and the graph on the wall showed us something that wasn’t publicly known.
And it was how much tax did Manchester pay and how much did it receive back through central government grants and welfare? And we were all pretty shocked because we didn’t realise that we were such a dependent city. By 2014, regeneration had been going for 20 years. We had built the Commonwealth Games stadium. We had built all kinds of amazing things in the center of Manchester. All the big four accountancy firms had opened offices there. But whilst all of that change had happened – a digital sector, all kinds of interesting things happening in a center for music and culture. But yet we still didn’t pay as much tax as we got back from central government.
What we now know, of course, is that everywhere else is actually worse. And we now know that the whole of the country actually depends on central government largesse just to be self-sustaining. None of us pay our own way, and that is a national crisis.
It’s the national crisis that sits behind all the things we hear about in the news. Can we afford our welfare state? Can we afford our public services? What’s happening to people in those left behind places? They’re all tied to that issue in one way or another. So the challenge is, can we do something to change that? And what we need to do is somehow find a way of raising the regions without pulling London down.
London is a great place and it’s a place that many people want to come to for new opportunities, and that’s part of its vibrancy. But can we do more to make other places like it, albeit in their own way? That’s part of our challenge.
That has left us with some real policy implications to consider. While clustering should be supported for its economic benefits, how can we get a more balanced approach across the country? We’ve been very interested in what we can do around place-based strategies that could support that approach to social mobility.
And the thing that we’ve focused on most has been innovation. Because it’s not just about growth, it’s about innovative growth. We think innovation is not separate to social mobility. We think they’re inherently connected. Let me explain why.
When we view social mobility and the economy together, we start to get a picture of social mobility, which is quite different to the way we typically think about it. So we tend to think that if we have more economic growth, we’d have more money to redistribute, and to create more equality. And that’s part of the story. But that leaves us with the view that social mobility is largely about trying to manage bureaucratic interventions that try to correct unequal outcomes of one kind or another.
Now, when we look at innovation and social mobility in a slightly different way, there’s quite a growing body of academic research that encourages us to think about it quite differently. Actually, in an innovative economy, social mobility and innovation are actually part of the same process. It’s not that you get growth and then you have to correct it. It’s actually that social mobility is an inherent part of an innovative economic process. What do we mean? First let me be clear about what is meant by ‘bureaucratic interventions’. What inspires much of the current social mobility policy is the idea that the social origins of those who end up in elite positions, mainly professional occupations, should be in equal proportions, bearing in mind where they started from.
So as many people proportionately should end up in top jobs as if they came from the working class, as did those who came from the professional or upper middle class. That seems fair, but it is an approach that is riddled with problems. Whenever we try to be specific about exactly who we need to focus on to correct the unfairness, we end up with serious problems and difficulties.
So what defines disadvantage? Nobody agrees. I’ll give you a very quick example. There’s a public, national discussion at the moment around the two child cap in terms of benefits and the size of families. I’ve looked at contextualised offers for universities, and I cannot find a single one that recognises that household income needs to be equivalised for the number of children in the family.
So we are letting people into universities with lower grades based on the fact they seem to be disadvantaged, but actually we just don’t do the sums properly. We just don’t know who’s really disadvantaged. And that’s just a very good example of one group of people that would be missing out. There’s lots of other examples we could give you.
And secondly, it’s tied to another issue which is really important. The evidence does not say that nobody from a disadvantaged group will do well. It says on average they will do less well than others from different backgrounds.
Now within that there’s quite a wide range of different outcomes. So how do we know we’re picking the right people? How can we be sure we haven’t picked the wrong people? How do we know we’re not picking the low hanging fruit? From my vantage point, working in a further education college, every time I hear somebody saying they’re promoting social mobility, I look out of the window and think ‘but we’re working with the really tough cases of young people and you’re nowhere near them. And these young people are nowhere near going to Oxford, and they’re nowhere near working for elite companies’. They’re actually in a much more difficult situation than anybody is willing to admit, and they need a lot more work. Our collective priority should be much more focussed on these tough cases of young people. But they get lost in the way that we think about the problem, because they get hidden in the group averages.
Does this mean that nothing can be done?
Of course not. But it does mean that collectively we need to be more humble about our capacity to devise systems that pick social mobility winners. And by implication, the losers who we never talk about. Every time we support somebody to do better, somebody else is going to do worse. We are moving the deckchairs around in a zero sum game.
We just don’t know who the losers are. But I can tell you, if you’re considering a university letting people in with lower grades, the person who’s missing out is probably not the most advantaged person, but another disadvantaged person, who misses out by a small margin.
We just don’t know. And therefore we’ve got no real measure of the impact of what we’re doing. And when we consider the wider obstacles to opportunity which we see across the country, maybe it’s time to consider the merits of different approaches, ones which are more focused on the general conditions under which a much wider range of people can succeed and then thrive.
At the SMC, we are exploring this link, between economic growth, innovation and social mobility. In that spirit, we called on experts in the field, Philip Aghion, Richard Blundell and Xavier Jaravel to undertake a literature review on this theme. That research illustrates how elite formation relates to innovation and can act as both a stimulus and an obstacle, depending on the effective functioning of a competitive marketplace.
Their work provides insights into the links between a dynamic economy, the formation of high socio-economic groups, how they are held to account, and the circumstances under which this brings wider benefits and opportunities for all. So we published an article called Innovation and Social Mobility, which sets out a direct relationship between the two. This is because innovative economies inherently depend on increased opportunities for upward mobility, and this think piece emphasises how they can mutually reinforce one another.
The key points it makes are these. The notion that societies must choose between being innovative and being inclusive is wrong. Rather, it suggests that innovation and social mobility are interconnected and can be promoted simultaneously through effective policies. Interestingly, the research also suggests that innovation by entrant firms has a positive and significant effect on social mobility. And enterprise and creating and fostering competition are key to the story.
Very briefly, I’ll summarise some of the factors that are important to consider. On one side of the coin is fostering innovation which then supports social mobility. So innovation leads to the replacement of all the technologies and practices, which fosters social mobility by creating new opportunities and new entrants. Entrant innovation by new market players significantly boosts social mobility, whereas incumbent innovation by existing firms doesn’t have quite the same positive effect it can do, but not quite the same.
And this means that we should be thinking very hard about an area that we never talk about in terms of social mobility, which is competition policy. Reforming competition policy to focus on dynamic aspects of the economy like entry and innovation, rather than static criteria like market share or the size of firms could arguably, enhance both innovation and social mobility.
The other side is, it’s mutually reinforcing. By fostering social mobility, we get more innovation. How? Because we start to think about how we foster innovation outside of the clusters that are already strong. We look at geographical disparities. We think about the roles our universities can play in fostering innovation in different places across the country, the way in which we invest and support that activity.
And we recognise that innovative firms do cluster, but we could also consider clustering them in a wider variety of places and therefore close some of those geographical gaps. We also need to recognise that innovations like AI and automation tend to increase the demand for labour and create jobs and opportunities, rather than leading to unemployment.
And we need to recognise that those who will do best in that context will be those workers with skills that are complementary to those new technologies. They will benefit the most, while those with routine skills will benefit the least. Within that, we have to ask ourselves perhaps some different questions about the way we foster talent, because we need to be aware of the possibility of the lost Einsteins and the lost Marie Curies. These are the people who might not be in that world of innovation, invention and disruptive economic challenge, partly because they come from backgrounds where they don’t have those opportunities, but also because actually in this country, we push all of our graduates down the same route.
Far fewer graduates in this country start firms than in America, for example. We just don’t encourage it. Instead we encourage them to go down a very safe route, and to not take risks. There are a whole range of reasons that sit behind why we all tend to be quite risk averse. And there’s quite a literature about how that is linked to economic stagnancy in this country.
It also means that we need to be really clear about what education policy should be focusing on. I’m going to say a little bit more about that, but we should particularly recognise the importance of helping young people to understand the opportunities around innovation, around science, around technology, and around new business and enterprise, as well as all the things they currently learn about.
This means that,in terms of social mobility policy, we need to broaden out and think quite differently, not just about education, but about competition policy, about technological diffusion, which in our country is very slow. We need to think about labour market policies and about regional disparities. And to see these as interconnected, if we start to crack one problem, we start to crack the others.
This means if we want to improve social mobility, we start with recognising that the heavy lifting is done through innovation and the economy. And when that works well, we get churn at the top, and we should get a cascade of benefits down to everybody.
For those of you who like the technical details of social mobility speak, that means we improve both relative social mobility and absolute social mobility at the same time. Whether you measure it by occupation or income, that’s about a rising tide genuinely lifting all boats. Now, in our view, we think there’s a whole range of things that need to be done to foster all of that.
You hear the discussion about reforming planning regulation. There’s a whole lot of regulation in our country, which can inhibit innovation and growth. I won’t list them all, but you start to see policy focusing on some of those things. But our argument is we need to do those things, but we also need place-based approaches to be able to support on a local level.
Because part of our challenge is about creating that independence, that creativity, that sense of destiny for all of those places that I mentioned right at the beginning. This is no quick fix. And we’ve been quite open and quite conscious of the fact that we haven’t produced lots of policy positions that we think are going to say, well, in the next nine months, the next 12 months or next two years, let’s do these things, and all that will change.
I have been working in this field for 30 years and actually many of the same things are here now that were here 30 years ago. We’ve made very little progress on some of those very big issues in this country. Instead what’s happened is it has got worse over time, and we’ve ended up with a model we cannot afford.
We’re now stuck with a doom loop. We can’t keep taxing London and professional services to pay for the welfare that’s bailing out the rest of the country, but we can’t let the rest of the country keep on declining in a spiral with declining public services. The problem is, we have got into a situation which is breaking, and we’re going to have to find some creative and innovative ways around that.
Now, there isn’t a quick fix, and it’s complex, and we’re not shying away from that. Our view is that unless we focus on this over the long term, we will be here in another 30 years saying the same things, and we can’t afford for that to happen.
There is a tendency to want quick fixes, so we end up with a lot of policy churn within governments and across governments. You find it in all kinds of areas. We all know the political process does what it does. But if we can start to think about place-based approaches through the prism of social mobility, that starts to give us a grand narrative that can give us that long term view.
It brings together the economic, educational, social, cultural and other issues, and we think we can build some measures into that that can start to get beyond that short term policy churn and give us a framework that might get us onto a better footing in the long run.
What I’ve said today means we do need to think differently about social mobility policy and start off in a different place if we want to make a difference.
If we accept the arguments presented here, it points to the need for a change in policy direction such that, in simple terms, the goals are realigned:
- Competition Policy: Focuses on dynamic competition to foster entrant innovation.
- Education System: Reduces the number of lost Einsteins by promoting inclusive education and exposure to innovation careers.
- Technology Diffusion: Encourages the adoption of technologies that complement workers’ skills;
- Labour Market Policies: Provide the kind of training that enhances both hard and soft skills; and
- Addressing regional disparities: Attracting innovative firms to regions with low innovation.
But it also means we’ve got to think differently about three things that we don’t talk about too much.
In the context of disruptive innovation and properly functioning markets, rather than assuming all inequality is a bad thing, it’s important to note there is good inequality and there’s bad inequality. The same is true of competition. We tend to think that a lot of our social mobility problems are caused by competition. Actually, they might be caused by the lack of competition.
But when we think about it in a different way, one of the problems about lack of competition is it creates bottlenecks in lots of ways, including the entry into professional occupations. We have published a paper on occupational regulation, and the way in which the law tends to highly regulate some parts of the labour market and not others.
For example if you want to be an accountant, it’s very heavily regulated, which means fewer people become accountants and those accountants are better paid. Their position in the labor market is protected. But compare this with another kind of profession, like to become a hairdresser in this country, you don’t need any qualifications. This is an example of that inconsistency that’s partly due to professional bodies being very strong in terms of influencing policy. And non-regulated professions aren’t.
Finally, education. Education is really important. But not on its own. That is what we are conveying today. To be clear, I am not advocating that we go down the milky road of ‘let’s teach creativity, 21st century skills – it’s all generic. We can all learn it on the internet. We don’t really need to know much anymore’ etc.
It’s the complete opposite of that. Creative people build their creativity on knowledge, and knowledge is built in a systematic way, and in a structured way, over time.
The approach to building systematic learning must remain because that is key to people having the knowledge to be disruptive. Not everybody works in the same way, but you will find that all disruptors have that wider level of knowledge. But that also leaves us with a really difficult problem. People imagine that technical subjects, apprenticeships, for example, are an easy solution to the fact that a significant number of people are coming out of our schools with terribly low levels of skills.
And those people are the truly disadvantaged, not because they don’t have any money, but because they have no power. They have no power in the labour market and then they have very limited opportunities to change that. And that’s when you get into that cycle where low skills, low qualifications beget low income. And that is inter-generational. We can’t take English and maths out because actually it’s not just about jobs, it’s about being a parent and passing on learning, and it’s about trying to find ways of breaking that next cycle.
The optimistic thing to say is actually the evidence on innovative economies shows that the highest skilled people are not the biggest beneficiaries. High skilled people do well, whether in an innovative economy or not. The biggest beneficiaries, the research tells us, is that when the economy is innovative, it lifts those at the bottom most. It lifts their wages and it rewards their tacit knowledge.
And being in the workplace and gaining knowledge and being invested allows people to develop their skills and hopefully to build their families a better future. I will leave you on that optimistic note.