Why we need to transform how universities and employers enable greater diversity into work
Tricia King has joined the JS Group Strategic Advisory Board as its Diversity into Work Champion, leading a new strand of the Group’s mission to tackle career progression for disadvantaged students and secure opportunities with large employers. Here she talks about her personal journey into higher education (as a student and later a leader) and the personal challenges that she has faced.
As the child of Irish immigrant parents and the first person in my family to go to university, the power of education to transform lives is not lost on me. My personal experience has also opened up opportunities for my own children to move into graduate level jobs after getting good degrees at universities they loved. I was the ‘pivot generation’ for whom social mobility was a lived experience. I was also very lucky. I paid no university tuition fees and received a full maintenance grant.
It’s every bit as important but much, much harder for ‘first in family’ students today to follow in my footsteps and transform their own lives. My generation enjoyed enormous educational privilege, but we seem not to be able to pay it forward. I think that’s partly why I have spent the last 30 years working in the higher education sector with a particular passion for tackling the barriers to a university education for those from under-represented socioeconomic groups.
I have seen universities work incredibly hard to attract increasing numbers of non-traditional learners, especially when tuition fees increased. I have seen them offer these students the right sort of support during their studies so that retention rates have improved significantly. As a Pro Vice-Chancellor at Birkbeck, University of London for 11 years I was right at the heart of this vital work, but extensive recent enquiry suggests that we have not yet worked out how to help these students get the good graduate jobs they deserve.
I have some hard-wired memories of how it felt to be a second-generation immigrant child arriving at university in the 80s. I knew very quickly that I didn’t belong, and I felt like a fish out of water. I know now that I lacked the cultural capital and social confidence of my peers. That my mum, although enormously proud, did not know how to help me. When I was invited to interview, she accompanied me as far as the university gate, fearing she would in some way embarrass me or undermine my chances of success if she came in. Neither my mum nor I had any idea about what to wear and, looking about me, I immediately knew my choices were all wrong. Once I got to university, I worked so hard and so intentionally to fit in. I lost my strong north London accent within days. I noticed and imitated the way other people dressed, behaved, and spoke. I thought it was my job to adapt. I desperately wanted to ‘pass’ as middle class which seemed to me the types of students that universities then wanted. I’m sad to say, I never even took my university friends to visit my family or home.
As a Governor at Greenwich University today, I am very proud that our mantra is ‘our students succeed because of where they come from, not despite it’. It’s exactly the right aspiration and Greenwich is very well placed to deliver. But it certainly wasn’t true in my day – and I wonder just how true it actually is today. For some students the barriers to a good graduate job seem still to be so high.
As Professor Sam Friedman as the LSE has demonstrated in his important research, even getting a first-class degree doesn’t necessarily open the door to good job prospects for all students equally. The playing field isn’t magically levelled by the simple act of graduating. There is strong evidence to suggest that students from the least advantaged families and communities do not thrive in the jobs market and face significant barriers to career success.
I have been talking about this a lot recently because I have now joined the Strategic Advisory Board at the JS Group and I am their Diversity into Work champion. I am delighted that Chris Millward, former Director of Access and Participation at OFS, has joined the Strategic Advisory Board too. For both of us, this is a passion project. We know that things need to change if all students are to flourish in the workplace. We are helping the JS Group to develop a ground-breaking new Diversity into Work initiative to improve employment outcomes. The focus is on working in partnership with students, founding corporates, smart employers, university partners and other experts to scope, develop and implement innovative new services at all stages of the student journey to support the graduate employment outcomes of the ‘first in family’ students.
One part of the Diversity into Work mission is working with large corporates to connect them to students from groups under-represented on their graduate schemes. They know that building the diversity of their workforce is a crucial way of safeguarding the future success of the business. This need is driven by a serious strategic imperative not a ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ tick box exercise. Many recognise that their current recruitment practices fail to attract and secure a truly diverse pool of candidates.
Another Diversity into Work plan is around good mentoring. I know from my time at Birkbeck that 1 to 1 mentoring can make all the difference to non-traditional learners as they explore, understand and pursue their career options. But if you train both the mentor and the mentee it can become a transformational two-way process. The mentor can certainly help the student enormously BUT the student can also call out and challenge the aspects of the business that create barriers to their success. Change can happen. Everybody can win.
We’re going to be looking at building confidence and social capital by creating a range of innovative digital resources and ambitious face-to-face events to help tackle the barriers; trialing new ideas that, in time, may become scalable.
I want to reach back now to my 18-year-old self as she suddenly realised that the wider world was very different to that Irish/ Italian/ Polish immigrant community she had grown up in. As she met many privately educated people, at least one of whom lived in a castle, she lost her bearings, her confidence and her sense of identity. It was a time of deep uncertainty as well as significant personal growth. It took me two decades to work out that I could be well educated, work in professional jobs AND stay true to my cultural roots.
