Sutton Trust

So, uh, when I joined the university five years ago, I'd already...

Uh, so I was based at Queen Mary in University of London, and I'd written a report for the social mobility charity, The Sutton Trust, and we had looked at, uh, experiences of accent bias at different life stages, and university kept coming up And, uh, the University of Edinburgh kept coming up, and then I got a job at the University of Edinburgh, and I made it my mission to work on this.

I don't want students like me who are WP or working class to, uh, experience this, right? As you said, it has really detrimental effects on their ability to succeed, their ability to feel happy, um, to be at a university, um, campus environment.

And so I started working with two student societies at the time.

... bits of testimony.

Yeah.

So in the Sutton Trust report, we found, uh, we spoke to a lot of students.

One student, for instance, from, was from Lancashire, and she had a student, uh, in freshers week who, I think it was freshers week, who assumed that her parents lived in a council house just because she spoke a variety of English that is often, you know, singly heard as working class.

And it was my placement year that taught me those skills.

But also, As someone that comes from a non-traditional background, the only work experience I'd gained prior to that point was through the Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility Foundation.

And it was very ad hoc.

My placement year gave me 15 months of nine to five, five days a week.

But ultimately, that came from a place of sacrificing because I was their child, not necessarily because they understood me the context that they understood the profession.

So I had to find the resources.

I had to apply for things like Pathways to Law organized by the Sutton Trust, which I got onto because of my academic ability, which then gave me the insight into the profession.

I was able to start networking.

There's an access to work programme.

You know, the Sutton Trust do a lot of work in this respect.

So there are FE colleges that recognise that there are not enough of existing employees in these traditional industries to be retrained to fill these jobs, that they will need lots more young people and from diverse backgrounds if they're going to meet the skills needs that Wales has.

They can't just go to the same old methods or the same old groups that they have because they know that this workforce has to be more diverse if it's going to meet the number of jobs that are available in the future.

And that difference between 12 and a half hours and 22 and a half hours is what to a child, Ciara? How significant is it in terms of how well that child will do in their later schooling life?

As I said, the research from the Sutton Trust in England says that a child from the 40% of the lowest income bracket, those children will benefit from 20 hours per week.

And it just is shocking to me that an education minister whose primary responsibility is to the education of children would make this move in order to really... to support working class parents.

And it's an indictment that his childcare strategy has failed.

It's Nick Harrison.

It's the CEO of Sutton Trust.

Listen, Nick, I've got no issue with Sutton Trust.

I've got no issue.

But there was a bit in this tweet.

Of course it is.

There's no excuse.

Coming back to the Sutton Trust

And I think as leaders, we have a responsibility to keep up to date and to read around leadership, curriculum, behaviour, attendance, whatever it might be.

And I think with all the guidance that is released from the DfE, I think with the EEF, with the Sutton Trust that have done some brilliant work as well on things like this, You know, it's our responsibility to be reading those documents and those articles and knowing what the research is saying.

And

then doing that really important work, thinking about what does this mean to us in our context? Because it might look slightly different, but understanding, knowing your children, knowing your staff, and then thinking, right, they've said this.

I got to see the tapestry along with schoolchildren from Hastings who we were all seeing it for the first time we were all really excited by what we saw and it's something that I've been focusing on since the day the exhibition was announced last year my priority was to make sure that people particularly schoolchildren from the area I'm from got to see that tapestry and got to be inspired by it it's something We all know 1066, Hastings is at the centre of historical events, but actually our area has often not felt the benefits of that.

We are in the bottom 10 for social mobility nationally, according to the Sutton Trust.

Over 60% of our young people leave without the basic qualifications in English and maths.

And it was really important that we were part of this national moment.

It might be different, but, you know, it stands to reason.

There's also the make-up of newsrooms, which I find interesting, and I know there was a report that came out last year by an organisation called the Sutton Trust, which is this sort of social mobility charity in the UK specifically.

But it found that a very high proportion of British media professionals went to private schools.

Colour me shocked.

We know that a lot of social mobility is going backwards.

We've had some stark assessments from people at the Sutton Trust recently that's talking about parts of Sussex nationally near the bottom in terms of life chances through attainment and things like that.

There's some really big problems, but...

The reason devolution is happening is because the government wants growth.