Read: Working together we will drive equality of opportunity - and measuring socio-economic background can help employers show their progress.
The last couple of years and our experience through the pandemic have driven home the reality that the least privileged communities are often the ones hit hardest when things take a turn for the worse. We saw it during the pandemic, when the poorest people and communities in our society experienced higher mortality rates, more long-term illness, and a greater negative impact on their children’s education from school shutdowns. Now, it’s an economic impact as the cost of living crisis grows, with the same communities on the front line, and local economies disproportionately hit by reduced disposable income.
That’s the challenge of weak social mobility - advantage accumulates but so does disadvantage, and it’s why where you start in life tends to be where you stay. But the systematic nature of social mobility also means we can all play a role to help break this cycle of inequality of opportunity.
New Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has rightly signalled the Government’s continued commitment to its 2019 manifesto promise of levelling up. Hopefully it’ll be clearer over the coming months how a Sunak Government intends to deliver on February’s White Paper with its 12 Levelling Up Missions. But the White Paper also acknowledged that beyond Government, businesses and others should individually and collectively take the reins more firmly on driving levelling up, referencing our work through the Social Mobility Pledge (at the heart of which is the Purpose Coalition).
Through our work we’ve seen just what a difference employers can make on driving social mobility - in communities, for their own employees, working through supply chains and procurement and, as the cost of living challenge bites, supporting their customers.
Britain invests billions of pounds every year on education and skills, with a focus on closing attainment gaps and huge amounts of data collected to track progress in schools. Yet problematically for a country trying to achieve equality of opportunity, we have no real measures of what then happens to people in the workplace.
So, whatever an employer does to drive levelling up, measuring impact is crucial to make sure you’re having a real impact. And the most important levelling up measure for any employer starts with tracking the social mobility power of its own opportunities and the socio-economic background of its recruits and employees.
The good news is that work by the Government’s Cabinet Office, then developed by the Social Mobility Commission working with our Social Mobility Pledge team and others, means we know how to do this socio-economic measurement and what data to track. It’s more straightforward than you might think, and it’s already been successfully trialled by Government departments in 2019. Now we just need it to be adopted by employers in a wider Britain, and it’s probably the single most important measurement we’ll need to make sure we level up Britain.
That’s what the Equality of Opportunity Coalition is about - bringing together private and public sector organisations which have committed to tracking their employee socio-economic diversity. They’re sharing their experiences, their know-how and ideas and are backed up by a growing number of cross-party MPs in Parliament who are applauding the steps these British employers are taking to track the levelling up impact their opportunities have on communities.
A wide range of organisations, covering over 300,000 employees and rapidly growing, have already joined the Equality of Opportunity Coalition, from the Co-op Group to law firm Shoosmiths, with bp, UK Power Networks, and the BBC all coming on board. Public sector employers such as universities like the University of Derby and Staffordshire University, St George’s University NHS Trust, or local authorities such as Essex County Council and South Kesteven County Council are also now starting to track their socio-economic diversity. Some Coalition organisations, such as the BBC, have challenged themselves with targets for how much they want to improve their numbers over the coming years. With the support of the major accountancy bodies such as ICAEW and CIPFA we are getting the word out and about to employers far and wide.
Many of the early adopter employers are finding out they’re more of an engine of social mobility than they had previously realised. Others are finding they may have further to go, but the fact they are tracking progress demonstrates an authenticity and seriousness to achieving more which drives real respect. For would-be employees, seeing an employer that shares their values is increasingly a precursor to them joining the organisation. And, of course, for a wider country that is determined to see a fairer, levelling up Britain, businesses taking on that responsibility for driving change and actively measuring their social mobility impact is exactly what people want to see and hugely welcomed by them.
What gets measured gets done, and we’ll get more done working together. If we can better understand the socio-economic makeup of our workforce, we can tackle inequality and drive social mobility more effectively. If we can see more employers come together through the Equality of Opportunity Coalition then working together, we’ve a real chance to break the cycle of inequality of opportunity. That’s why measurement matters so much.
