88: Doing Social Mobility Better: Tokunbo Ajasa Oluwa, CEO of Career Ready

The Elephant in the Room

Shownotes:

According to a report from last year by a leading consulting firm - compared with the other developed countries, the most disadvantaged in the UK are less likely to climb the income ladder and economically advantaged tend to stay at the top. No surprise there…

It is no secret that, the on going impact of the pandemic, cost of living crisis, economic recession and global uncertainty has pushed more households and therefore young people into poverty. For young people from underprivileged backgrounds this is going to deeply impact their ability to bridge the attainment gap between them and their better off peers. Young people without access to resources, mentoring and networks required to progress will struggle to reach their full potential. In 2023, instead of disappearing, the barriers to achieving upward social mobility are getting more and more entrenched in our society…..No surprise there either……

To understand more about social mobility, imperatives and impact I spoke with Tokunbo Ajasa Oluwa, CEO of Career Ready, a passionate advocate for young people and social mobility. We spoke about the findings of the last State of National Report by the Social Mobility Commission and discussed why as a developed country we have been unable to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty?

👉🏾 We spoke about the role of education and access to higher education in enabling transformation

👉🏾 The need for a collaborative approach between governments and the private sector

👉🏾 The Sutton Trust research on the impact of accents on social mobility finds pervasive accent bias. The research highlights the clear link between accents, socioeconomic background and social mobility

👉🏾 We also discussed the fact that social mobility has not been on any recent party election manifesto, the effectiveness of the APPG on social mobility. And the possibility of change without political will

👉🏾 Measuring progress - via long term impact

👉🏾 The people who inspired him - his mother and Dame Anita Roddick

And if you would like to know about the super power he would choose, head to the podcast 👇🏾👇🏾👇🏾

Memorable Passages from the podcast

👉🏾 Pleasure to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

👉🏾 So my name's Tokunbo Ajasa-Oluwa. I'm Chief Executive of Career Ready, a social mobility charity that works across the UK. My background, I suppose I've worked in the third sector and the private sector, kind of jumped from one to the other over the years. Well, what's been the golden thread throughout my career is working with young people, particularly in the focus of youth empowerment and helping young people to realise their potential.

👉🏾 But before doing any of that type of work, I trained as a journalist and I worked in the media industry for about a decade or so, before making that shift into leadership working in the third sector and young people.

👉🏾 So Career ready, essentially, we're a charity that believes talent doesn't have a particular postcode. So for us, we consciously focus on working in areas of the UK that have a higher level of deprivation. And what we do is we work in partnerships with schools and colleges in that region, to identify young people that are in need of our support to help them realise their potential when it comes to career choices.

👉🏾 So how we do that practically is through three things. We provide each young person with a mentor. We provide them access to masterclass workshops that are delivered by volunteers from our employer partners, and we offer them a paid internship at one of our employer partners during the summer holidays. And those three things together help the young people make informed choices about their futures, it exposes them to new possibilities that they didn't believe were available to young people with their background. It helps them to increase their self-esteem and importantly it helps them to grow their social captial.

👉🏾 Okay. I think the part that I love is when I get the opportunity to go out on the road and see our program in action. So whether that's visiting a young person when they're on their internship, at the end of their internship, when they're doing their presentation and their level of growth in confidence and self-esteem that you see in that young person. Or when I get a text or a message, an email that one of our young people have now secured employment with one of our partners, those bits are the best.

👉🏾 Being able to see, go out on the road, whether it's in Belfast. Edinburgh, Manchester, wherever it is across the UK, being able to see the impact of our program, that for me is definitely one of the highlights.

👉🏾 One of the more challenging sides is as a leader having to make tough decisions. And the reality is we are a medium-sized charity. And as much as we'd love to support all the young people that need our help, we have to make choices and one of the tough parts about my job that I don't like, is where we have to kind of identify what the size of our lifeboat is. And there are people that need our program, but due to our circumstances, we don't have the capacity to facilitate their need alongside those that would prioritise. So that's probably the bit of my job that I don't enjoy the most.

👉🏾 Very different indeed. I literally just came back from visiting my team in the North of England. And you'll be aware about the narrative around the levelling up agenda. Which very much feels like a narrative rather than a reality. And I think that the reality is that there are multiple components that relate to that intergenerational poverty reality that we're facing in the UK. And I think one of the key points is, we need a more unified approach to those social challenges. We can't continue this vein of working in silo where you're talking about housing, you're talking about mental health, you're talking about, parenting challenges, all of those kind of social factors, intertwined, relate to where we are as a country. And I think a prime example of that, is for us as a organisation, we can only deliver our program in viable circumstances. And the reason why I stress that is because a region like Cornwall in the southwest of the country, is in desperate need of an offering like ours.

👉🏾 However, we're not able to provide a viable model because we don't have the business community in that region to enable the volume of internships that we'll need to offer. So you've got a clear need, but you don't have the united agencies working together to respond to that. So I think we need to definitely think about joined up approach to solutions rather than a budget sitting over there and a budget sitting over there and not realising the connectivity.

👉🏾 I think another prime example of what I'm talking about is we recently had the initiative tackling youth unemployment called Kickstarter scheme. Significant amount of resource went into Kickstarter scheme. However, it was a standalone entity, so it was about identifying young adults who are unemployed at the moment and getting them into employment for a period of six months. But once that concluded It just dropped off. So you're potentially dropping those young people back into the position where you found them. For me, a logical notion would've been connecting Kickstarter to our apprenticeship objectives and seeing that as almost like an introduction to an apprenticeship scheme. And that way you don't have that volatile narrative around a key social issue, which is unemployment.

👉🏾 We've been here before though. This is the challenge, and there was a totally different government, I think 2008, 2009, last recession, we had something called the Future Jobs Fund. Literally replica kind of model. But again, it stood in isolation. So the frustration I suppose is, when are we gonna learn from our own history and enhance those propositions, which as an entity, the objective is brilliant. It's about the sustainability and how do you then make it long term viable to see the return on that investment.

👉🏾 Well, I think we're in a different time to say when we had that kind of boom in migration. So for those of us that have our first generation, British African or British Asian, it's a really different time to when our parents were first arriving on these shores.

👉🏾 So first and foremost, education is key. It's critical that as a principle doesn't go out of date and doesn't shift. But the circumstances, of what is required to your point around the cost. I think it's about ensuring that young people are making informed decisions. It's very rare for young people coming from the backgrounds that we work with, that have the luxury to go to university just for the experience.

👉🏾 Those days have come and gone, right? It really does have to service what you're trying to do with your life moving forward. So the informed decision is there are certain traditional industries and sectors where, the university education is still critical, right? But that's not necessarily the narrative for all industries.

👉🏾 So this is why, for us, it's really important that young people get that exposure to what is available and then making informed choices about how that can support them. So if I had my time now all over again, rather than going to university and studying journalism, I probably would've gone onto an apprenticeship degree or a degree apprenticeship, right?

👉🏾 Where you are getting the best of both worlds. You get that qualification whilst learning on the job, whilst being paid, rather than how long it took me to pay off my student loan. And that was nowhere near the cost of what the student loan is now. So I think, it's that point and I think the fact is we cannot underestimate the position of poverty within society and how that impacts people's decisions.

👉🏾 Yeah. I think in that point private sector definitely have a role to play. But I think like a cocktail or a salad, it requires a number of agents coming together and seeing the kind of sum of its parts and seeing the benefits to all entities.

👉🏾 So if you're thinking about it from a business perspective, when it comes to diversifying workforces, there's a plethora of research out there that reinforces the profitability and the business sense of diversifying your workforce. So from a socioeconomic kind of point of view, I don't need to kind of beat that drum. But at the same time, how that supports businesses alongside society is that you are removing a cost from society. That is a young person on unemployment benefits, and empowering them to become a positive asset where they're feeding into the economy through their disposable income and the businesses accessing talent that they wouldn't normally get access to.

👉🏾 So I don't necessarily think there is a hierarchy of who should be more responsible. I think again, it's about that collaborative approach of understanding that each entity has a benefit of us finding a long term viable solution to this. So I've seen some great examples of employers evolving the way they work and making sure that they can tackle social mobility. Some are further along that journey than others, and they are like the trailblazers and providing those examples of best practice.

👉🏾 And that's across industry, but you are right. I definitely agree that it's a requirement that business needs to look at. And I think a great example of that collaborative approach, I'm not sure if you're aware of something in Scotland called The Young Person's Guarantee, which literally has that, each of those stakeholders coming together, unified approach to a long term solution.

👉🏾 I mean there was a few recommendations within the report, which I think are kind of sensible and practical steps. I do think it is about ensuring that diversity from a leadership lens. So the fact of the matter is we need more diversity of experience, lived experience, and that will be reflected in people's accents as well.

👉🏾 So I think if you were to kind of focus on any particular aspect where we need to really drive that development, it's in leadership. It's in senior management roles and setting ourselves some specific targets around what that looks like in regards to diversity of lived experience. Because I think in certain industries it's very challenging, if you're thinking about the kind of banking and law for example or insurance - these are some of the more traditional industries which have got further to go compared to say, the creative industries or digital industry. So for me, I think it is about utilising the recommendations within the report, but if there was anywhere that I would hone in on that and really hold employers to task, it's around that senior leadership piece.

👉🏾 Yeah, I think pre-pandemic, the profile of young people we work with. I think some of the most impressive qualities about them, is they are some of the most tenacious and resilient individuals of their generation. Just based on their lived experience and that was pre-pandemic or pre-living crisis, living costs of where we are.

👉🏾 So, I think how we have to support this generation is really adapting to the fact that we are in a different climate and really understanding what support looks like now compared to 2019. Just even the idea of a number of young people not having access to digital resource, that enable them to enhance their potential, that's a key factor.

👉🏾 We've recently did some research in partnership with Total Jobs and it said about 50% of 16 to 18 year olds are no longer confident about securing the job that they desire. So there is a real level of anxiety, a real level of disappointment within this generation z. Whether they're school leavers or whether they have aspirations of going into the higher education. So many of them are adapting and changing to the circumstance.

And I think it's just about us providing them with as much wraparound support as we can. I think a prime example of, what I'm referring to when I say wraparound support is there are the practical components around their careers, et cetera, but also mental health, one of the organisations that we have a relationship with is a charity called Young Minds. And during the pandemic, their hotline for parents that needed support went up by 400%

👉🏾 So that was in the height of the pandemic. So now we're in the cost of living crisis, which compounds that, I expect that to be even more so we have to be creative in what a fit-for-purpose support looks like for generations Z.

👉🏾 I would say yes, but I think having a stronger, wider employment market is definitely where we need to go. But for me, I think an example of what we can replicate right across the UK is what they're pioneering in Scotland with the Young Person's Guarantee, because that is, about long-term sustainability.

👉🏾 It's not a short-term solution, which, gives you a spike for a quarter when it comes to new fund employment. It's woven into the fabric of doing things differently in more of an alliance approach. So yes, definitely is about macro policy, but it's also about understanding what role each component plays in that long-term positive outcome.

👉🏾 Yeah. I think the APPG is brilliant for what it is. And that's for the fact that it brings together interested parties in this space, and it kind of provides a driver and a think tank space for change.

👉🏾 But you're absolutely right, we're not gonna see that change until central government is bought into it and prioritising that. Now this is where, in theory, the levelling up agenda could and should come into play. Because it's intertwined into the reality of the social mobility profile.

👉🏾 So for me, and the recent autumn statement in regards to the cuts to the levelling up agenda, it just feels like we're going in a bit of a vicious cycle. So I can't see foreseeable significant government change, unless we can see some meat behind the words that have been banded around the, levelling up agenda. That needs a lot more structure, a lot more focus and targets that we can hold the powers that be accountable to. So yeah, the APPG is great as an entity, but it doesn't have the power to create the change that we need to see.

👉🏾 Yeah, so what we do at the moment is first of all we focus on the profile of the young person, and I think a key component of success and progress that we're making is measuring apples with apples.

👉🏾 So in the past is very tempting to kind of measure the cohort against an average across the nation. That's not accurate or appropriate. So what you need to actually do is measure the profile of that young person, get a controlled group of young people that don't have access to the program and see like for like, what kind of outputs you've got. So that's what we've started to do as an organisation and we've been really invested in our data and impact resource to enable us to do that in a proficient manner. But in addition to that, it's the longitudinal research. So that's about engaging our alumni because the kind of work that we're doing is not short term. So yes, we can have immediate results within, have they gone into a positive destination after 12 or 18 months engagement, that's fine. But I'm more interested in where are they three years, five years from there, what impact has our program had on their long term futures and the decisions that they've made. And what's even more profound is then measuring what impact that their journey has had. In their family, in their local community.

👉🏾 Because then it's about inspiring that change. Literally, just a couple of weeks ago I was in Belfast visiting some of our students and there was a young man who did an internship at Citibank. He used to walk past the building every day, didn't know what went on in there, secured an internship, impressed them so much, was invited to one of their assessment centres for an apprenticeship, and he started that apprenticeship this month in Citibank.

👉🏾 So this was an organisation that he knew nothing about 12 months ago. He walked