27-05-2025
'Oldham's relationship with Manchester makes things more complex'
He's one of the country's most influential voices urging our political leaders to do more on social mobility: the all-important issue of ensuring everyone has a chance to succeed in life regardless of their background.
And Alun Francis, the current chair of the Social Mobility Commission (SMC), can trace back his passion for the subject to his time as Principal of Oldham College, where he realised the debate was leaving out many of the young people studying there.
As a typical further education college, the majority of students will come with lower school grades and are unlikely to end up at Oxbridge but can still be trained and prepared for important, interesting occupations which will improve their lives.
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Mr Francis, who grew up in north Wales, tells The Northern Agenda podcast about his work to help these young people in Oldham and his new role as Principal and Chief Executive of Blackpool and The Fylde College.
Listen to the full episode here:
"I felt too much of the debate about social mobility had become a bit narrow," he says. "It was very much focused on what we've recently called the lucky few.
"Those are the academically very able, but poorer members of the community. I'm not saying they don't need some help, I'm not criticising that, but I think that can be a very narrow way of doing social mobility.
"Particularly if you start to think of it in terms of the shape of our economy, because it does tend to then lead to 'well let's find people with the talent to go to elite universities and then to professional jobs'.
"Those elite universities often means leaving home, leaving the place you grew up in and for professional jobs the epicentre has been London and the South East.
"And if you follow that route then it becomes 'well we've strengthened London, we know London's economy is very strong you can see the pipeline of talent going into those areas, that's absolutely fine'.
"Except that the reality is we look out the window and we can see huge regional disparities. We can see significant differences in terms of economic opportunity."
He advocated this new way of looking at the problem when applying for a role at the SMC, the body that promotes social mobility in England and assesses whether progress is being made on the commission.
This year is the 15th anniversary of the Child Poverty Act, the legislation that brought the commission into being. And there remain huge disparities in the life opportunities young people enjoy depending on where they're born.
A recent report by the Sutton Trust charity revealed the top 20 constituencies for opportunity are all in London, with the North East and North West in England over-represented among the lowest ranked areas.
Mr Francis says education isn't a magic bullet to bridge the gap and that the state of the economy - and a lack of higher-paid professional jobs in some parts of the country - is at the heart of the issue.
"We've also got some issues around opportunity for those at the bottom end," he says. "An inability to move out of what might be described as an opportunity bottleneck.
"That's where there's a mixture of low paid, low qualification work, welfare, family breakdown, a range of interconnected problems which actually mean that instead of having a trampoline those who grow up in those areas end up having a bit of a swamp which holds them back rather than projects them forward."
Mr Francis joined Blackpool and The Fylde College in 2023 after 13 years at Oldham College, and says the Greater Manchester borough and the Lancashire coast have a number of similar challenges.
And he says in one respect, Blackpool has more economic opportunities than Oldham because of the resort's strong tourism economy and recent successful regeneration work.
The Blackpool Multiversity scheme will see some of the country's worst housing stock knocked down and replaced with a centre for learning that offers a variety of ways to acquire higher level skills, rather than just one route to university.
Oldham's relationship to the booming city of Manchester "makes things more complex", he says, though praises the Atom Valley development zone to the north of the city bringing world-class research, manufacturing and materials together.
Mr Francis says: "Manchester has boomed incredibly quickly but the vast majority of the jobs have tended to be south side of the city region. For a long time, people thought it was just about transport, but the Metrolink gives people access into the city centre.
"It doesn't allow you to get across Greater Manchester that easily. If you're looking for a job in the airport, but live in the north side of Greater Manchester, that's quite difficult. However, the Metrolink hasn't proved to be the solution."
So what are the solutions to improving social mobility? Mr Francis tells me an approach that adapts to the varying needs of different places is the way forward.
But what hasn't helped is the constant churn of policies and decision-makers, with more than 20 Ministers for skills coming and going over the course of the last three or four Westminster administrations.
And he says governments need to stop doing things that are very expensive but not necessarily effective. Perhaps surprisingly he cites New Labour's flagship policy of Sure Start centres as an example of this.
The centres did "definitely achieve some good outcomes", he says, but only improved education achievement by one GCSE grade for people living nearby. "When you consider how much it cost, there may be other ways of achieving that improvement in grades which would be more effective."
He adds: "We need to come up with better solutions that are more affordable, but also start to have a better track record in terms of effectiveness.
"And that's why we've moved down the direction of the place-based approaches, because quite honestly, there's not a great toolkit of things that we can say 'do these things and everything will be fine'."
