Working-Class Kids Need Help to Help Themselves

EVERY SO often, people ask me for advice on the secret to success. I can't give you a magic formula to fulfilling your aspirations, but I can tell you about what I've learned from my own experience. My dad died when I was young, and after that my mum brought up me and my brothers and sisters on a Glasgow council estate. Nobody in my family had yet gone to university, but I decided early on that there was no point letting any of these things make a difference.

I liked to read the papers, kept an eye on the finance section, and learned what I could from it. I also learned the value of setting goals in every area of life — however far-fetched and impractical — and getting used to then thinking practically about what the next thing to do would be to achieve each one.

At the time, the government was privatising various services, and there were some great opportunities for people who got in early, and that started me off in finance. I kept my eyes open for other opportunities and over the years, I moved from outsourcing IT services to Asia to setting up financial companies and starting charities and, most recently, a family counselling service in Glasgow.

So I was particularly pleased to be asked by the government to join its panel on how to improve social mobility in Britain. Like most people, I would like to believe that we could make success depend less on factors such as what kind of school a child goes to, and whether their parents have a lot of books in the house or are well-connected, and make it depend more on your own skill and effort. With social mobility, what is at stake is nothing less than the extent to which we control our own destiny or have it shaped by factors beyond our own choosing.

For about 30 years until the 1970s, Britain was making good progress on that, but since then, we have fallen back. Compared to their parents, the life chances of the generation born in the 1980s depended less on their own skills and effort, and more on these external factors.

We launched the report, Unleashing Aspiration, last week, and I think we have come up with some good policy ideas to shift things in the right direction. I led the team on examining internships and risk. For many people, the chance to do an internship is an essential part of making their aspiration a reality. In some sectors, such as journalism, you can barely expect to get any job unless you work for no or low pay first. However, many young people cannot afford the luxury of working for free. Others simply live in isolated places, or don't have contact with relatives or friends who employ interns.

We have offered ideas to introduce more young people to internship opportunities, help them find affordable accommodation if they live far from the city and use student loans to help pay for the period of unpaid internship. If our ideas are successful, the best and most talented will be able to compete for internship places based solely on intellect, talent and potential. These ideas won't solve all the inequalities in the country, but they will be a step in the right direction.

However, while the government and society can support aspiration, it is individuals themselves who hold the key. Fostering a culture of aspiration requires, in many cases, individuals and families to change their attitudes.

I remember a guy from high school who could easily have gone on to university, but didn't because his parents were eager to pull him out of school so that he could work in the family business. They saw higher education as something that took up years which he could have spent earning money.

That is understandable. But five or 10 years down the line, those who couldn't go to university have fewer earning possibilities than those who could. What is needed is a change in attitude — from seeing higher education as just years spent not earning, to seeing it as making an investment in yourself, or your children. It is a sacrifice now for future gains, whether that be financial or intellectual development.

Contacts are incredibly important for building a career, and while you can't train yourself to have contacts, you can train yourself to spot the opportunities to make contacts, creating your own luck by training yourself to recognise the opportunities in who you know. Training yourself to spot opportunities is another example of an attitude change which will make a big difference to aspiration, and ultimately, social mobility.

So if I could send one message to the bright, young, ambitious people who the report wanted to help, it would be that government may support you, but you would be surprised how much you can train yourself to make the opportunities to fulfil your aspirations.

Azeem Ibrahim was a member and team leader on the prime minister's Panel For Social Mobility And Access To The Professions. He is a research scholar at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a World Fellow at Yale