In 2009, the government's fair access to the professions report was released to a lukewarm political response. Led by Alan Milburn, the report highlighted the potential for a new economic dividend from social mobility and the growth of the professional economy.
The major political parties pretty much ignored the issues thrown up by the report for three years. The followup report released early this year slipped under the radar, despite its stark conclusions on how access to the professions has become even more exclusive since Milburn chaired the original report panel.
There's been too little attention paid to the realities on the ground, especially outside London. It must look like we have enough graduates to fill the available jobs, so there isn't a need to focus on the social consequences of the fact that young people have to work for unfeasibly low pay (if they're paid at all) for an extended period to get past the chicken-and-egg experience barrier to a good first job.
Instead, government policy and the background discourse has focused on simplistic supply and demand. We've been faced with the rather mean-minded argument that struggling graduates should take any job they can get and that graduates always earn more.
These arguments sidestep the key reason why graduates find it so hard to get entry-level jobs that meet their (usually very reasonable and positive) career aspirations: as the number of career-entry roles in the professions has decreased, the cost of getting that crucial first foot on the ladder has increasingly fallen on to the shoulders of graduates themselves.
A key factor in this is the abrupt conflation of higher education and career development. Suddenly, everyone coming out of university, college or school is expected to be immediately job-ready, with that crucial period where the benefits of a good education are translated by training into the skills of a specific workplace suddenly cut out of the process. It's happened without central planning and development, and everyone – universities, colleges, schools, young people – is struggling to get to grips with the transition.
The slowdown in graduate recruitment has been acute in the north of England. With the regional economy distributed across a diverse range of towns and cities, there's no single hub to concentrate the strategic professions enough to provide a critical mass of good-quality career development opportunities.
There are fewer professional firms in the regions than there once were; advertisements for entry-level and career development roles such as journalism, PR, law, architecture and civil engineering are sparse. These areas don't have the mixed economy needed to provide employment and training to locally-born graduates.
There's also very little hard data on the impact of this; solid numbers are usually needed to highlight a problem in a way that motivates change, so there's a clear need for more serious research on how the regional graduate economy is evolving in terms of aspiration, attainment and access to opportunity.
Rounding off this perfect storm is a fourth problem. The cost of moving to London is high, not least because living in the capital is expensive if you don't have a family member or a close friend to stay with. That prices anyone who isn't well-financed or well-networked out of the market straight away.
All this means that concentrating graduate opportunities in London and its environs doesn't just help to overheat the London economy, it's an important factor in closing off social mobility and access to opportunity for those from less affluent backgrounds. The problems graduates face in the north of England are the problems graduates face everywhere, but the old industrial towns of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Humberside and Tyne and Wear have the most to lose without a regional solution to this regional conundrum.
We need a new solution, and we need it now. Alan Milburn suggested an internship loan system but would this be the best thing for young people already heavily loaded with student debt? Also will this do anything about the regional imbalance? Will more loans improve access to opportunity and promote fairness, or just store up more instability for graduates and deter many disadvantaged young people from pursuing reasonable ambitions?
Regional towns and cities themselves need to take the lead. We need well-funded interventions to cover the cost of post-education career development. Local government will have a role to play, but we need to look primarily to philanthropically-financed third sector schemes. There also needs to be a long-term strategy to ensure graduates not only find smaller towns and cities attractive places to live and work, but viable too. It's time for economic development to mean more than shops, factories and banks.
David Hoghton-Carter is the founder and programme director of Minerva Pathway, a new social venture aiming to tackle access to opportunity and attainment for graduates in the north of England
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