Read: We’ve given them a steppingstone to something they never dreamed of

The University of West London is one of the higher education sector’s leading social mobility drivers. Here, Vice-Chancellor Professor Peter John shares his own career story that has helped to shape his approach today

Q// What was your aim when you were growing up in Wales? Did you ever expect that you’d end up being a vice chancellor?

A// Absolutely not. I came from a very poor family in south Wales. We lived in a prefab, we didn’t have a house and I had a very, very seriously ill brother. He was three years older than me and died when he was eight.

Literacy wasn’t the big thing in our family, it was just survival and, because he was dying, they had to bring a teacher into the house under the 1945 Education Act. So I sat on the table when he was being taught to read and I learned to read by the time I was three. Then I was pushed off to nursery because we couldn’t look after a dying child at home, and from that I got the 11 plus, [went to] Grammar School, and so on.

My main aim at that age was just to carry on as best I could, because all the attention was put on my brother every minute of the day, because he could die quite easily. So I was left to do with things on my own, I suppose.

Q// Do you feel like this made you somebody who was self-reliant, because you’d always had to make sure you took your own decisions?

A// Of course. In South Wales at the time, it was a pretty dark period back in the 50s and 60s, and I was made self-reliant, and I had no expectations on me to exceed, which was a good thing. [There were] no expectations at all because I was the only one that had ever done anything and was likely to do anything. I came from a mining family. I lost my uncle who broken his neck in the pit when he was 21.

So I came from that kind of background, although there was one important thing – south Wales miners had a very strong sense of autodidact, self- taught, and there was always a feeling inside the community that education mattered, but not necessarily formal education.

Q// When did you first start think that education was the path you were going to go down?

A// I had a scholarship to do a PhD and after I did my degree I decided I wanted to teach children who were in trouble. I went to work in what was then called a community homeschool, they were the ex-borstals or prison schools. I had to live in with the students as well as teach them and it is almost impossible to to explain what it was like to teach those children.

Reading about their backgrounds, which were absolutely, desperately bad in terms of what had happened to them, and then trying and teach them at the same time, was too difficult. I decided to go back into academia then, and then worked at what was then Oxford Polytechnic, now Oxford Brookes, then I went to the University of Reading, and then to the University of Bristol, where I stayed for about 16 years, and then moved to University of Plymouth.

That was mainly lecturing. I became a reader at Bristol, then I got a chair in Plymouth. Then from Plymouth out of the blue, in three years, I went from being a dean, to being a VC within three years.

Q// Tell us about what you’ve brought into the university in terms of your ethos and how you wanted it to work?

A// The first thing I realised when I moved out of the Russell Group into the new university sector was how different it was. There was different construction of a curriculum, different students and different kinds of possible ambitions that they might have. I was struck by the lower level of ambition, both at Plymouth, but mostly at West London. So I decided very early on, to concentrate on those students. What their needs were, and what their desires were and what they wanted.

Most of them wanted their families to be proud of them, they wanted their families to be well looked after and they wanted the opportunities that other people took for granted. I built the curriculum around that over a five-year period to make sure that these students could not only succeed in the way they wanted to, but their families in the next generation could succeed as well.

That, if you like, made me move the university towards a more enterprising, career-based university because, in the end, these students don’t have anything to fall back on. They have to make it for themselves a bit like I did in a funny kind of way, and I felt an affinity with them, I understood them, I could speak to them and they understood me. I think that’s the way I designed how the University of West London would continue.

Q// It’s worth remembering that young people are going to university for a reason - not just to learn, but to make sure they can then get connected up with something afterwards. So really what they want is to understand that the chance of being able to translate a degree into an opportunity afterwards is really as high as it possibly can be; and that’s something you’ve really worked hard on, isn’t it?

A// Absolutely right. I [mentioned] the lack of real ambition and you had to really explain to them what the world was like out there, what they could get, what the possibilities were, where they could go.

Too often they’d been constrained by their environment, and understandably, so. So we had to spend so much time opening up the possibilities for them. But there’s nothing worse than opening up possibilities. Hence, we started this idea of every student having a work placement guaranteed.

That starts to put the stepping stones into place so they can move from that into their ambition into where they want to go. Because many of them don’t have a very clear idea of what they want to do or where they want to go when they’re young. And they don’t have the networks or the connections that so many people do and take for granted. So you have to create them for them.

The only way you could do it was to get around 6,000 employers to offer work placements and that took a lot of effort. But once that was done, they started to take advantage of it. And now they write back to me and explain what’s happened and so on, and you realise that you’ve given them a stepping stone into something that they never dreamed of, or possibly thought they could ever get into, while so many take that for granted.