James Turner, our CEO, reflects on 25 years of efforts to improve social mobility in Britain.
A great deal has changed in the world and in politics since 1997. Then, new Labour were on the ascendancy, Bill Clinton was starting his second term – and we knew nothing of the War on Terror, or of Covid 19 and its implications. In our world, the term social mobility was unheard of outside a small academic circle, the pupil premium was over a decade away from inception, and the idea of running a randomised control trial in schools (let alone over 200, as the Education Endowment Foundation has now done) would have more than raised eyebrows. Fair access to university was not front-page news – and the state school intake of Oxbridge (a flawed but powerful symbol of opportunity) languished at less than fifty percent.
