Read: Universities being more open has helped drive social mobility

I remember exactly where I was when, aged 18, my life transformed for the better. It was the moment I got my A-level grades to study Economics at the University of Southampton.

We were on holiday in Devon that week, so I’d asked a friend, Caroline, to pick my results up. I ended up calling her from a public phone box in a village just outside Kingsbridge in South Devon. My parents said they knew I’d been successful getting on to the degree course I’d wanted because they could hear me scream with delight from right down the road where they’d parked.In that moment, as for so many young people receiving their grades this week, the chance to go onto university changed absolutely everything for me.

We headed to the pub across the road and my dad bought me a celebratory glass of Babycham – it was the closest thing to prosecco or champagne that pubs sold in the late 1980s. I never really liked it, but that day it tasted perfect.

For this year’s A-level students, it’s been a far more challenging time. They’ve had a Covid pandemic and schools’ shutdown to contend with. For those finding late places through UCAS, the university system for matching students to courses, there have been fewer options available this year, due to grade uncertainty post Covid and increased course deferrals.

Yet some of the biggest steps forward in the past 20 years in driving social mobility have come from universities working hard to open up higher education to more people and communities, often those the first in their family to go to university, as I was, and it must continue. Now those same universities are innovating on how to make sure the time and investment in a degree turbocharges new opportunities and careers for their graduates, especially those from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

Because I focused on my studies, I ended up with a first class honours degree, but it was only in my final year that I seriously thought about what to do after university. Looking back, I needed much more advice, earlier in my degree course, and access to work experience to help narrow down my options. Today there is much more support on offer.

It’s crucial that Yorkshire universities, like Bradford and York St John, are working ever smarter and harder during a student’s entire time with them to connect up talented graduates to employment opportunities.

Initiatives like Bradford’s “Graduate Workforce Bradford” should be looked at by ministers and other universities for solutions on how a university can tailor its graduate talent pipeline to what major employers and a regional economy need.

And now it’s not only universities but, increasingly, local employers who understand they must open up access to their opportunities, just as universities have done, to become engines of social mobility. That includes public service broadcaster, Channel Four, based in Leeds, which is becoming ever more vital to the region’s levelling up plans.

Nadine Dorries, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, has rightly challenged the wider media sector for being too narrowly drawn from an Oxbridge talent base and populated by people having connections to those already in the industry.

But with increasingly deeper roots across the Yorkshire region, Channel Four is showing how it can be pivotal in not just developing a thriving creative and media sector locally but doing so with opportunities for new communities and bringing a very different, diverse group of people on board. Its schools outreach and work experience provision can help create the talent needed for the network of production companies that makes its programming. Those production companies in turn develop a wider creative sector.

It’s a win-win for Yorkshire that surely has to come ahead of a distracting ownership debate on privatisation which could put that regional levelling up effort and opportunities at risk.

My Social Mobility Pledge campaign is working with other businesses and employers to enable them to do what Channel 4 is doing – thinking strategically and systematically about how to make sure their opportunities can change lives.

For the universities and employers who are part of it – we’ve called them the Purpose Coalition – the Social Mobility Pledge work isn’t just a good thing to do that helps use opportunities to level up communities. It’s also about the skills they need to succeed and tackle this country’s skill shortage and productivity challenge through taking practical steps to help us stop wasting so much talent.

Things in Britain have changed a lot since getting my A-level results in that Devon phone box.

The rise of apprenticeships and vocational education means there are far higher quality choices post 18 available for young people today. Yet they know, as I did, that education is their route to having better prospects and a fulfilling career.

Keeping open access to higher education matters hugely for students. We’ve just got to make sure the careers they ultimately aspire to are also open to everyone irrespective of background – it’s what levelling up means – a level playing field of opportunity for all.

Featured in the Yorkshire Post.