By Kieran Hurwood
When I first came to LSE four years ago, I was admittedly quite scared of the city, having only ever lived in a relatively unequal, semi-urban, semi-rural part of Southeast England. Whizzing ambulances, massive crowds and too much choice from shops to restaurants to libraries now abounded around me. I mostly stuck to myself. It has been a long time since then, and through a series of fortunate events, I have developed effective social skills and to some extent, a friend group dynamic with some. This year, I have had the privilege to take up the mantle of Opinion Editor at The Beaver and to do a multitude of other things with my free time. I have undoubtedly had a good time here at LSE, and I will graduate with strong grades and lifelong friendships when I leave.
But, there is something else I have observed during my time here. Modern Britain, that is, the intelligentsia of our nation, has become deeply fixated with social mobility, and rightly so. Our nation is deeply, deeply unequal. The stats and our collective experiences bear this out across a range of metrics, from employment in top jobs, to top university places, to life expectancy, to incomes, to quality of healthcare and schools. Consequently, many scholars, charities and organisations have begun trying to rectify this. Indeed, there are a plethora of organisations devoted to helping people from disabled, ethnic minority, socioeconomically disadvantaged and otherwise marginalised groups to get a taste of workplaces and social environments which might usually be out of reach. These experiences and programmes are frequently of excellent quality, receiving awards and significant political and financial backing. There is no question that they are part of the answer to resolving socioeconomic inequalities in this country.
However, as someone who has applied for many of these programmes – with varying levels of success – and completed a couple, I have to say that there remain substantial challenges around access, assessment, and implementation.
The core of these problems is storytelling. Many of the most successful applicants on these programmes have an amazing life story to tell. They have something in their lives which sets them apart from other candidates. This is nothing new and arguably has always been a part of job applications: when faced with the challenge of a sea of homogenous candidates, how do you pick between them without succumbing to the temptation of asking about uniqueness? Competition for schemes and supported internships is understandably high on social mobility schemes given the small quantity of places. Research internships, work experience placements funded by our departments, financial support for postgraduate study – the recruiters for all these programmes are keen to understand our motivations and want to bring together interesting people with interesting stories to build common understanding among tomorrow’s elite.
‘My parents came to this country from (X) in the year (Y)…’ or ‘…growing up in (X) neighbourhood in (Y)…’ are common statements to hear, because these make for engaging and interesting stories which secure places on social mobility programmes. I am guilty of this myself, though for my family’s dignity I rarely discuss the more sensitive parts. I grew up in a working-class neighbourhood in a low-income household, with complex family history stemming partly from our mixed-heritage background, all while harbouring an undiagnosed disability. I was let into my local grammar school on appeal, and have now had a successful first-generation academic career in one of the UK’s top universities. I have an interesting story to tell and was able to secure access to some of these programmes. But…what about those that don’t?
The harsh truth is that the youth demographic in the community in which I grew up was mostly comprised of white British kids who had rarely left their hometown. Some of them were immigrants, or descended from immigrants, mostly from eastern Europe, but well over half of them were white British families in poor financial and social stead. What made it worse was that many of them would be trapped in this cycle: their children forced to attend schools which were substandard due to poor funding and society-level challenges, with some potentially – though not as frequently as you might expect – becoming caught up in criminal activities. This might make an interesting story, if more of them, like myself, were supported and given the chance to break out of that cycle. But it is just that, that the interesting stories are those in which disadvantage is initially overcome by extraordinary luck (for example, being accepted to study at a top university) despite extraordinary embedded disadvantage. The schemes and programmes primarily select those with an interesting story for advancement, leaving behind the ‘ordinary’ disadvantaged population.
Really, what many of these schemes are asking our young people to do is narrate their life’s tragedies and tribulations to a panel of the lucky few who have already succeeded, who will then judge whether we have been lucky enough, and whether we are skilled enough at telling our story of luck. In some way, I feel this is an unavoidable process, but it clearly detracts from actual skills-based assessment and discernment of potential. One positive application process I went through asked me to carry out a presentation on policies I believed would be effective for a specific situation. It gave specific parameters, genuinely assessed me on my skills, and gave me an opportunity to demonstrate what I could do. It also acknowledged that my skills wouldn’t be perfect, instead focusing on my potential for development and my capacity for reflection. However, other social mobility schemes have simply asked me to narrate my life, asked me why I’m applying, often hinting that when applying for the role I should specifically cite how difficult (or different) my life has been to others. It ends up resembling something almost pornographic, asking us to perform in a certain way, act in a certain way, as if to gratify them that the donations of time and money that the lucky put towards these schemes haven’t gone to waste.
In my view, this runs the risk of creating a narrow elite of tomorrow whose primary skill is simply to tell their story in a persuasive way, and whom are once again lucky. There is nothing wrong with telling one’s story – and it comes with many transferable skills – but I am concerned that if this becomes a priority skillset for our generation, then we may become a generation that puts ourselves down and mopes in our disadvantage. We may even compare our levels of disadvantage to others, inadvertently turning on one another when we should be focusing on fixing the exclusion of not just the interesting disadvantaged, but also the disadvantaged who aren’t all that interesting. It is true that not everyone can statistically be successful. It is true that luck plays a huge factor. But it’s also true that getting into a mentality where we simply accept a system of socioeconomic disadvantage and selective social mobility will bring little overall change to our society. Our aim should not be to elevate those in disadvantaged positions to the positions of those who have been lucky, but instead to bring about a change in which few or none experience the indignity of disadvantage on the scale that many of us have faced in this generation.
Photograph from Unsplash
