96Discussing social mobility with two role models: Victoria Ayodeji and Marley Ahmed; Career Ready Youth Advisory Board Members

The Elephant in the Room

According to a Deloitte Report from last year, “The UK has one of the poorest rates of social mobility in the developed world. This means that people born into low-income families, regardless of their talent, or their hard work, do not have the same access to opportunities as those born into more privileged circumstances”.

Charities like The National Tutoring Programme, the National Access programme, the Sutton Trust, The Social Mobility Foundation, Career Ready, UpReach are working hard to support young people in difficult circumstances. However, we are unlikely to see any transformational change without political will, finances, a joined up approach between the government, private sector and charities. And of course a mindset change.

A couple of weeks back I had two members of the Career Ready Youth Advisory Board on my podcast. For those who don’t know Career Ready, it is the national social mobility charity founded in 2002 to boost social mobility by empowering young people and giving their talents a platform to flourish. Career Ready now has a network of 1000 employer supporters, 3500 volunteers and have have so far reached over 200000 young people including supporting 30000 young people on its high impact Career Ready post-16 programme.

Both my guests Victoria Ayodeji and Marley Ahmed are highly self motivated, are on the path to great career journeys and deeply committed to giving back. And they are involved with various initiatives which support them in this ambition. Essentially these Gen Z social mobility advocates and role models, believing in walking the talk.

In this free wheeling conversation, we spoke about their early years, educational attainment,

👉🏾 Role of support networks and intermediaries like Career Ready or the Social Mobility Foundation

👉🏾 The Role of mentors in learning and making career choices

👉🏾 Their experience as Chair and member of the Youth Advisory Board at Career Ready

👉🏾 Advocacy and what giving back means for them

👉🏾 Social mobility in the UK and challenges

👉🏾 Role models, the future, change and many other uplifting issues…..

Depressingly a Sutton Trust research from 2022 reiterated something most of us already know - that opportunities are still determined by background. The research shockingly predicted a fall in income mobility for poorer young people due to the impact of the pandemic and the cost of living crisis.

What do we ensure that young people from disadvantaged background do not fall through the cracks........Who is to be held accountable for lack of support and access to opportunities?

Shownotes:

Memorable passages from the podcast:

Victoria: Hi everyone. My name's Victoria.

Victoria: So I recently graduated from university, so I went to Cambridge and I studied geography. I am also the Chair of the Career Ready Youth Advisory Board. Beyond that as well, I'm very interested in pop culture. I'm also a DJ. I'm also very interested in storytelling. I've been public speaking for the last 10 years and I'm also very passionate about social impacts. That's probably me in a nutshell and I'm trying to be a content creator as well. So feel free to follow me on socials.

Marley: That is quite an introduction. I'm Marley I'm a graduate University of Essex. I'm also a member of the Career Ready Youth Board. I completed the program in 2017. By the time that this goes out, I'll be part of the first-ever cohort of Merky FC, working at Adidas in a community's role with the football space. And I'm also very heavily interested in social mobility, having done my dissertation on social mobility and achieved a first class.

Marley: Essentially I think growing up in council estate it has many pros and cons and I could go into detail all day, but I really do feel like growing up within my community you had to have thick skin. There was a lot of experiences that we went through and a lot of things we saw that made us build up a lot of resilience.

Victoria: For me, it probably all started from when I was pretty young. For some context, I'm an introvert and oftentimes when you grow up as an introvert or someone who is very shy, probably until age 14. Why is this is important? Being an introvert from a young age, I was always very, very self-aware. I always knew and understood the social issues that were happening in my community. I grew up in inner-city London, and that gave me a drive to succeed in life and look for opportunities where possible.

Victoria: So that's pretty much how I then thought more widely about the kind of access to support I can get. For example, when I was in school, I had access to charities like Career Ready, which is how we're on this podcast. But then also I applied for programs with organisations like the Sutton Trust and Target Oxbridge, and that's run by Rare recruitment. Also into university The Social mobility foundation. So these are all charities that operate in the UK and also UpReach as well. A lot of these opportunities I just found through Google. And I think for me, it kind of showed me that there was access to opportunities for young people from less advantaged backgrounds.

Victoria: That kind of got me interested in trying to better myself and get access to different things. That kind of encouraged me to kinda do the work I'm doing today. So whether that's mentoring, speaking in schools across the UK but I think also beyond this as well. When I was actually 17, I wrote an essay about social community in the UK. So this is back in 2016 when Teresa May was still prime Minister, and I wrote an essay about grammar schools in the UK and whether or not they should be reintroduced. I've been very interested in this topic for a long time. For me, like a lot of my childhood experiences have kind of been tied to social impact education.

Victoria: Even when I was 15 years old, I gave a school assembly talk about education because this is in wake of Nelson Mandelas passing away. So yeah, I've been very passionate about education and access to opportunities for those who are less advantaged in society.

Victoria: Yeah. I think for me, I thankfully went to a school that, yes they focused on education attainment. Same at home, there was the focus on trying to get really good grades, but there also was a focus, now that I look back on it, on holistic learning. So I went to a school that really pushed us to make sure we were doing extracurricular activities.

Victoria: For example, when I was 16, I co-founded a project called Youth Go Global, which was basically 15 young people in East London who were fundraising and volunteering to go on a cultural exchange program to Hungary and then also to Gambia. Again, this has nothing to do with educational attainment. But it probably had a big impact on my personal development from a young age. So I think for me, Educational attainment has always been quite important because the way I've seen it is about, if you get certain grades, it allows you to jump through certain hoops, but as you know, in society grades are a big thing that matter, that's other thing important for a young person's personal development.

Marley: I, I guess for me there was a push. I think I briefly stated earlier and if not, I'll state now, but I was a first generation student, so I come from a family of six, a big family. I'm one of the latter middle children and essentially the only one who probably would complete my entire education.

Marley: And my parents essentially, I remember studying sociology at A level and seeing this, and it's always stuck with me. There are three types of parents when it came to educational attainment. Parents that had the the support child, the parents that were disengaged, and a type of parent in the middle that didn't have the cultural or financial capital in a sense, but really wanted you to do well.

Marley: And I feel like I was grateful to have both my mother and father in my life who supported me, always pushed me and said phrases like, you can be wherever you wanna be. That really, really helped. So I never felt too much pressure. And then I guess at university I always had my own individual why, in terms of why I wanted to achieve my degree and I wanted to go on to do.

Marley: And so I guess there was a push in educational attainment by myself, but I think more so it was the experiences that come in higher education. So I specifically applied for Sussex because of opportunities, like in my first year, I was able to kinda study via sponsorship at Nan Yang University in Singapore for four to five weeks.

Marley: Or I was able to do internships in my second year because my university had a focus on increasing diversity. So factors like that were also very important to me and helped me stay driven, I guess.

Victoria: Yes. I think they're really important. Obviously there is the cliched saying that a child is raised in a village, but I think having family, teachers, community is really important. And also, again, that's a point worth remembering. So for me, a lot of my journey has been enhanced by having amazing mentors who I've met through the charities I mentioned, and also some mentors who I just met through social media as well.

Victoria: So I think it makes a difference in regard to exposure. I always say when, if I'm doing my public speaking events, that you don't know what you don't know. And when you do have a mentor who is a lot more accomplished than you, someone who has achieved what you are aspiring to achieve, the opportunities now become endless because you now know what is available to you.

Victoria: Also I think that's, there's a lot to be said about when it comes to access to education for young people. I think as a society as a whole, we all play a role in trying to ensure that young people irrespective of their background, are able to have access to opportunities. I think it makes a massive difference when it comes to supporting these students.

Victoria: And I also think that there is a lot to be said about the difference between emotional support and material support. Cuz sometimes, you might have someone who grew up in low an income family where their parents can't necessarily give them material support, but they can give them emotional support by supporting them in regards to what they might wanna do.

Victoria: But then someone might come from a wealthy family, where the parents might give them material support, but they might not have emotional support. But then also vice versa, you've got people who come from wealthy families who have their material and their emotional support. So I think there's a lot to be said about trying to think more holistically about a young person's personal development and also an adult's personal development.

Victoria: We need both the material access, but then also the emotional access to our own personal and professional development.

Marley: Victoria hit the nail on the head in terms of it takes a village to raise a child and I think that's evident in walks of life.

Marley: I think teachers have a key role and they're put under a lot of pressure in various ways, but I think back to science in about year 11. So a couple of years ago, about six or seven. But there was one teacher that would essentially if it wasn't up to the mark and pulling our weight, we'd stay behind and do extra science lessons.

Marley: And I look back now and it was just being in that space, still after school, we all focused and kind of gave us all a growth mindset. In the sense that a bit before everyone else started revising for GCSEs or A Levels, we would just come together and do some flashcards or do some practice questions. And it was really key to have that space and have a few jokes here and there as well, but then also be able to focus.

Marley: And I believed that all of my friendship group some predicted Cs and so on, we all got Bs or higher. So I think teachers have a key role and in terms of teachers, they have workload and then they unconsciously take on that emotional support element as well.

Marley: And that's where I'm coming to what Victoria said about mentoring and where I thought it could be so effective. And I guess something that I'm gonna try and do over the next couple of years. And hopefully I have a good enough network and people around me is a bit more focused on sponsorship. In the sense if there's any opportunities arise that any of my mentees I feel like are suitable for, if I know someone in that field or I know of a job or role, I'm able to talk highly of my mentee when they're not in the room. And I feel like mentorship is amazing and I'm a big advocate. I have mentor, mentees, but over the next couple of years in my life, I'd like to focus a bit more on sponsorship.

Victoria: Yes. So basically the Youth Advisory Board was set up in 2021, so both Marley and I were on the very first cohort, trailblazers.

Victoria: The purpose of the youth Advisory Board is to ensure that with the activities of Career Ready because it, because it's a youth centred charity, we kind of wanna make sure that young people's voices are fundamentally heard when it comes to different changes. But then also trying to kind of foster a really strong community of alumni on the program.

Victoria: So whether that's ex-students who did the program, also ex-mentors, and to kind of ensure that you can learn so much from the Career ready program. Doing Career Ready when I was in school changed my life. But it's also about trying to encourage and spur on those life-changing moments post the program.

Victoria: So different experiences that I've had so far was be given the opportunity to speak alongside the CEO Tokunbo at events. So encouraging employer partners to sign up as mentors, that have been very successful, so just sharing my journey of Career Ready.

Victoria: I think for me as well, running live events. So I did an event with a personal branding agency I interned at called WOW. So it was a co-led event why I worked with my manager, Phoebe, and we were basically running a session on personal branding and how young people can use social media for good. And we've also run events on entrepreneurship and also done a variety of collaboration events with different organisations like for example, Apprentice Nation, which kind of encourage more young people to have access to knowledge on apprenticeships in the UK.

Victoria: And so I think for me, the reason why I wanted be on the board, but also be Chair of the board was, I knew how transformational career was for my own life. For example, I had a mentor who is probably one of the most amazing women I've met in my life. Like, she really just changed the game for me because through her network, she allowed me to get free tuition for A-level economics in school. And I will tell this story whenever I speak and everyone's just like, whoa, that's crazy. And I think that's kinda why I'm so passionate about mentoring. That's why I'm very passionate about giving. And yeah, I think when it's early ages, but I think it's about trying to encourage that momentum post the two-year program for students to kind of ensure that they're still developing personally, but also professionally.

Marley: Yeah. What Victoria said, amazing summary. And I think similar to me, so from Willard Common where I live, where I did my Career Ready Internship. Until I was 17, I'd never been to Canary Wharf. It never comes to anyone from my community's mind. Let's go Canary Wharf for a day, it's not really something you do, but you can see the huge buildings, right up in the sky and you're like, wow, like that's amazing.

Like, I wonder what they do there, or I'd love to just go and see what London's like from their view. And it was really ironic, one day myself and a couple people I'd met on the program were just all there and we managed to get coffee on about the fortieth floor in Citibank.

Marley: And we were looking and we were just in awe. We're all from different parts of London, all the outskirts of London, and we're just like, wow. It's, it's just such a beautiful and amazing view. And I think in terms of the youth board, the reason I wanted to get involved is because of that engagement we get to have with young people. And I see us in a sense as like a sounding board for any initiatives or ideas they wanna come up with as a charity. And it's mutually beneficial in the sense that they want us to develop governance skills, develop any skills that are transferrable that we wanna work on, i.e. public speaking.

Marley: I'm very fortunate to have worked on their ACE events service, the event toward the start of the year with various schools from up and down the country come together in London. And I was able to do a sofa Q and A there, and then also at the awards event, I was also able to further do some public speaking in terms of giving out awards. And experience with like in the sense of working with the alumni relationships manager and thinking about how we could further connect and work with our cohorts and other cohorts. It gives us a range of skills to develop and the organisation gets a sounding board and some different perspectives on ways they can engage with young people. So it's really nice that it's mutually beneficial too, in my opinion.

Sudha: Brilliant. Marley, I noticed that you volunteered with Global Enterprise experience as a team leader. What do you do there in that role?

Marley: See that was an amazing opportunity that again my university offered. And...