Centre Write

Earlier this week, Michael Gove highlighted the “morally indefensible” domination of people who attended private schools in all aspects of society – from law to entertainment and sport. In the speech he emotively described how the issue of under-achievement continues to be overlooked and his own passion for positive change.

Rather than just private school representation though, perhaps what Mr. Gove was trying to highlight is the lack of participation in society – but especially in the professions – of those from less-privileged backgrounds. As a group of young professionals, this is an under-achievement issue that concerns us.

According to The Bridge Group, university students from less-privileged backgrounds who access university perform academically as well as their more privileged peers. Unfortunately, when it comes to graduate outcomes, the issue of background resurfaces and their paths begin to differ. The days of having a top degree from a good institution ensuring a career in the professions are well and truly over.

Graduate success and realising professional potential is increasingly dependent on having the necessary knowledge, soft skills, professional experience and networks – even if you go to a great university. It is precisely these things that students from less-privileged backgrounds tend to lack and find a challenge to gain. This in turn means that they find it more difficult to secure top graduate jobs and consequently the group under-achieves in accessing the professions. The result of poor access is poor representation, which may go someway to explaining the dominance of private school students Mr Gove was referring to.

We believe the solution to this issue will benefit not just students, but employers, universities and the Government. If students from less-privileged backgrounds at universities were better empowered to achieve their professional potential, employers could access an unexplored talent pool, universities would benefit from increased graduate employment and the Government would see improved economic performance.

The importance of this issue and our ability as a group of young professionals to be part of the solution has led us to found upReach. We are seeking partnerships with employers, universities and the Government to run a three year personal and professional development programme across universities and across the professions. The programme will add significant value to those that partner with us and would develop student participants’ knowledge, soft-skills and experience to empower them to realise their professional potential.

We believe that our vision offers an on the ground solution for addressing some of the under-achievement issues that Mr Gove spoke about and ensures that we make the most of our future graduates’ talent.

Henry Morris is the founder of upReach. 

Follow Upreach on Twitter: @up_reach 

The guest blog is published every Friday and views held by contributors are not necessarily those of Bright Blue, as good as they often are.

If you are interested in contributing please contact blog@brightblue.org.uk.

In Europe, publicly worrying about immigrant integration is a vote winner. The Fascist Golden Dawn in Greece threatens a May electoral breakthrough on the back of accusations that immigrants are violent and hurt a cohesive Greek nation. Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen claims she is the political centre of gravity in the French Presidential Election as Hollande and Sarkozy traded barbs on halal and headscarves at a fierce TV debate last Wednesday.

Eric Pickles and David Cameron have had opportunities to publicly worry about integration and they both have previous form – they have been quick to underline the failures of multiculturalism and have worried about the impacts of immigration. But Pickles and Cameron have chosen not to publicly worry. As recently as St. George’s Day, Eric Pickles, the tough-talking, no nonsense Secretary of State, stood up to make a speech about Britishness. The headlines were there to be written, but they never arrived. His speech was low key and played against type. His final line, the full stop on his speech, summed it up: integration is what makes our country great. There was no story to write, and the government publicity machine did not even attempt to crank into action.

Of course, in his speech and the government’s new integration strategy Pickles finds causes for concern: new forms of bigotry, worries about segregation in communities, anxiety over the impacts of immigration on communities and so on. The Pickles answer is clear. He wants us to be a plural nation but government should get out of the way and let people get on with integration. Government should only act exceptionally and confine itself to setting out the conditions for success.

We addressed these questions in a new report for the Migration Policy Institute, supported by the Barrow Cadbury Trust.

Our main findings are counter-intuitive. People, probably subconsciously, divide the integration debate into three different conversations without knowing it and then often talk past each other.

The first conversation is our national story, who the modern British people are and want to be. The second conversation is about our local areas. Are our communities successful and healthy places to live? The third conversation is about immigrant groups and how they are doing. Are they out of work, do they intermarry, are they failing in our schools?

On the first conversation, the Pickles approach is surely right. As opinion polling over time shows, we think the modern British story is a less ethnic one and more civic, less about where our parents were born and more about our role as active members of an ancient liberal democracy.

On the second conversation, politicians may worry about local communities, and whether immigrants make communities less cohesive, but our findings suggest we should worry less. Perhaps it is that immigration and integration are leitmotifs for change, and change worries us. Perhaps we have looked too often to the United States, where seminal work by Robert Putnam (who wrote the book Bowling Alone) links race, neighbourhood trust and social breakdown. But in Britain, our work and at least seven other major independent studies find no link between diversity and a lack of trust in local communities. Where communities are fractured, the reasons are that they have low quality services (schools, hospitals) and are poor places, where people have few resources.

Some academics go further, saying that all things being equal, the more diverse an area, the more likely the area is to be friendly and cohesive, with stronger neighbourhoods. Of course, a huge influx of immigrants to an area will cause problems, but we have answers to hand: better planning (we planned the arrival of over 100,000 Polish people in the 1940s, why not today?) and more flexible funding formulas would help a great deal. In fact, it should be a priority. Over 70% of immigrants now come to this country for less than five years. Old patterns of movement are cracking up and we need more flexible answers.

The third and final conversation is about immigrant groups and how they are doing. People have different things in mind when they talk about integration in this way. Some people are thinking of jobs and wages; others of social mixing, such as friendship and coupling. Here is where the biggest gap in government strategy lies. The government has little grasp on which groups are doing well and which are not, what the reasons are, and what types of performance we should measure. This is important as what we count, counts and the overall average is meaningless. For instance, if we measure employment, we find Indian men do better than the national average and Afro-Caribbean men do worse. But if we measure rates of intermarriage we find the opposite (Afro-Caribbean men are more than four times as likely to marry out). Without deciding on what is important and then knowing who is doing well and who is falling behind, we are at real risk of not prioritising our scarce resources.

Pickles then is right when he says integration is what makes this country great. The public also think so: over two thirds believe the integration of the children of immigrants (including the children of Muslim immigrants) is going well. Unlike other attitudes, this view is shared across all the social classes and by women and men equally. The view that we are going to hell in a handcart, let’s call it the Nigel Farage view, is confined to a miserabilist minority. It seems most of us believe in integration. But we have a responsibility to do more, and we should it do it more sensibly. We need more intelligent muddling through, more smart investments in groups who do less well and fall behind, and we need to spend more of our time and energy in thinking how best to do it.

Will Somerville is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Migration Policy Institute. 

Follow Will on Twitter: @MigrationPolicy 

The guest blog is published every Friday and views held by contributors are not necessarily those of Bright Blue, as good as they often are.

If you are interested in contributing please contact blog@brightblue.org.uk.

There are a number of things our London politicians like to talk about: themselves (most of them), their hair (Boris), the 80s (Ken) and being in the police once upon a time (Brian). In the debates thus far, they have delivered their prepared lines on all the ways in which living in our city must be made safer – rioting, knife crime, antisocial behaviour, terrorism – and all the myriad ways Londoners use to get about our fair city – cycling, the underground, buses, taxis, cars, walking, trams, even rickshaws! In fact, they’ve talking points on them all.

But on one issue of vital concern to Londoners, they’ve been slow to talk. Despite more than a third of Londoners saying that the cost of a home is a major problem affecting their quality of life (more so than crime, congestion, the general cost of living or unemployment), housing barely gets raised by the candidates, who choose to talk about nearly anything else.

So, we’ve ended up with a mayoral race that has failed to address one of the key barriers to Londoners living life to the fullest and making the most of the opportunities of our city. Of course, all the candidates have sections in their manifestos – dusty documents held in corners of their websites – addressing housing issues; but there is a failure of leadership across the field in making housing a subject of political debate and controversy, with candidates competing to be on the side of priced-out Londoners.

What about the fact a quarter of London’s families now live in the private rented sector: a market riddled with instability and unpredictable rent costs, hardly ideal for bringing up a family? Or that nearly 1.8 million Londoners are being priced out of their local communities by the soaring cost of a home? Or most importantly, that whoever is elected on 3 May will get more money, more land and more powers to run London’s housing?

Londoners deserve to hear the candidates’ visions for London’s housing – they deserve to hear the candidates arguing about whose ideas would most help Londoners get homes.

Shelter thinks that the next Mayor should seize the opportunity of the government’s devolution of housing powers in London to create a big new GLA brand that Londoners can recognise and hold to account: Homes for London.

Bringing together all the disparate agencies responsible for dealing with London’s housing crisis as Homes for London could deliver the same leadership on housing that transport gets from TfL. It could slim down the bureaucracy and duplication of the current system. And it could use the Mayor’s bully pulpit to raise the standards of renting in London through working with good landlords and pushing out the rogues; calling for longer tenancies and making London a more affordable place to live, work and raise a family.

Homes for London – a presence on every new build site, every empty homes renovation, a quality mark for good landlords – will remind the public that Mayor can make a real difference. Londoners know that the buck stops with the mayor when it comes to transport. They need to know the same for homes.

Emily Shipp is Shelter’s UK Campaigns Officer. 

Follow Emily on twitter: @shippsails

The guest blog is published every Friday and views held by contributors are not necessarily those of Bright Blue, as good as they often are.

If you are interested in contributing please contact blog@brightblue.org.uk.

In the midst of debates over philanthropy versus tax, the launch of Big Society Capital this week was presented as a “third pillar” of finance for social impact, alongside philanthropy and the state. Initially capitalised from dormant bank accounts it will channel money into social enterprises and community groups “to blend financial return with social impact”.

With £600 million to play with, this fund could be a lifeline for many community groups facing uncertain futures. But it’s not immediately apparent where the assurances of social impact will come from. Is the bank predicated on the idea that as long as a return is made on investments, you can assume the social impact is occurring? Without success being measured through other indicators I am not sure that’s necessarily true – especially not for hardest to reach groups.

In international development the pillars of finance are even more varied: Development finance covers any number of methods – from government aid to innovative sources proposed like a Robin Hood Tax on banks. It is not all about giving either: one key source of development finance would simply be to allow developing countries to collect the tax revenue they are due. No profit or return is expected with such forms of finance – and rightly so. Oxfam’s constant experience is that predictable, regular and un-tied finance allows for long term investment to pay health worker salaries or allow for basic services to be free at the point of use.

Having a healthy educated workforce will itself contribute to growth – but of course Private finance and investment has a role to play in development too. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) can be instrumental in aiding developing economies, and at the other end of the scale microfinance has had many successes. Profit does not equal poverty alleviation however – unless a pro-poor mandate sits alongside an institution’s bottom line. This is the area where DfID’s private sector lending arm the CDC was beginning to lose its way, and was rightly remonstrated by the Development Select Committee – leading to DfID promises of reform to ensure its investments will target poverty reduction.

But whilst FDI and micro-finance can help both large and cottage industries there is very little targeting the SME sector in between. Financing this “missing middle” would be instrumental in creating more equal growth, empowering women and also, particularly in the agricultural sector, contributing to food security.

It was in recognition of this that Oxfam set up the Enterprise Development Programme. It targets rural enterprises with $10,000 – $200,000 turnover, requiring investment (both loans and grants) for equipment or working capital. Typical examples – which often focus very much on the empowerment of women – include a mushroom producing and marketing company in Rwanda where the aim is to reach up to 900 women.

But if you want to attract bigger sums then offering a return on investment can be instrumental. Even more ambitiously, Oxfam has recently partnered with Symbiotics to pilot the Small Enterprise Impact Investment Fund (SEIIF), offering institutional investors the opportunity to achieve positive social change through investing, via Small Enterprise Financing Intermediaries in SMEs in the developing world. Similar in fact to Big Society Capital but a completely innovative model in development, a crucial attribute of this fund is that success will not simply be measured though returns. Oxfam’s role is to advise on the poverty focus of the fund’s activities. A large amount of work has gone into developing impact metrics which will give a rich narrative to describe the social impact of what is achieved – and in time contribute to a new impact investing industry standard.

So yes, it’s possible to achieve social impact or development and expect a return. But the links are not automatic. They can be outright contradictory when dealing with essential services such as healthcare, education and water. And if enterprise is to be pro-poor, measuring returns has to be accompanied by effective measurement of social impact.

Katy Wright is Oxfam’s UK Advocacy and Parliamentary Officer. 

Follow Katy on twitter: @katywright 

The guest blog is published every Friday and views held by contributors are not necessarily those of Bright Blue, as good as they often are.

If you are interested in contributing please contact blog@brightblue.org.uk.