Lampl - Aiming higher

SIR PETER LAMPL explains the work of the Sutton Trust and the motivations behind his philanthropy

The Sutton Trust has a simple but vital aim: to improve social mobility by providing educational opportunities to young people from non-privileged homes. It is not a straightforward grant-maker, or a think-tank, but a “do-tank”, which combines research and policy analysis, with practical projects which have the potential to be rolled-out more widely. Since I founded the Trust in 1997, we have run a wide range of innovative initiatives and undertaken over 30 research studies to shed light on the inequalities in our education system. Ten years on, the Trust and its partners have committed over £22m to educational projects, directly helped tens of thousands of children and – by promoting policy change in government and others – indirectly affected the lives of hundreds of thousands more.

The Trust was founded out of a sense of outrage. After attending state schools, I was fortunate enough to go to Oxford – where I had a wonderful time – and then to the London Business School. After a stint with the Boston Consulting Group, I joined a client in New York and eventually started my own firm to get in to a new field – now called private equity – and was lucky enough to make some money in the US and Europe.

When I returned to the UK in the mid-1990s, however, I was shocked at the lack of opportunities for bright youngsters from non-privileged backgrounds. I visited my old school, Reigate, which was open to pupils of all backgrounds when I was there. I found that it had become a fully fee-paying private school – so most of my peers, many of whom have gone on to great things, would now be excluded on financial grounds. I later discovered that the Direct Grant Scheme (whereby most of the places at almost all the best independent day schools were free and funded by government) had been abolished.

Shortly afterwards I had lunch with the president of my Oxford college, Corpus Christi, which in my day admitted a number of brilliant working class students from South Wales. The president told me that the college had taken very few such students in recent years. In fact, the proportion of Oxford’s intake from state schools had fallen from around two-thirds in the late sixties, to just 46%.

I felt I wanted to do something practical to address this shocking waste of talent. From living in the US I was familiar with the summer schools offered by Ivy League universities, so I approached Oxford with the idea of funding a summer school for students from those state schools with which they had never had any contact. After going to the US with a representative from Oxford to see the American programmes in action, in 1997 we funded a pilot summer school for 64 students from non-privileged homes. An enormously successful week followed, during which the participants sampled lectures and tutorials, met with current undergraduates and tutors, as well as getting a glimpse of the social life of a student. Sixteen of the 64 got in to the university.

Buoyed by this success, we established summer schools at Cambridge, Bristol, Nottingham, St Andrew’s and other universities, which now reach almost 1,000 students each year. The initiative has had a significant impact on policy too. The model was adopted by government, and summer schools are now run at the majority of UK universities as part of the £160m Aim Higher scheme. This made me realise that my own philanthropic giving could instigate much broader change and led to the foundation of the Sutton Trust.

As disadvantage starts before birth and continues to the workplace, the scope of the Trust’s activities has broadened since its inception, and we now run a wide range of programmes, beginning with the early years, through primary and secondary school, and continuing to access to higher education and the professions. For example, we fund a scheme to offer advice and guidance to the parents of very young children in a deprived inner city area; an access scheme to support non-privileged young people in applying to a leading grammar school; and a large-scale initiative to encourage more students from less affluent homes to pursue a career in the legal profession, by supporting them through their sixth-from studies and in to higher education. The over-arching aim is to ensure that all young people have the opportunities to make the most of their talents and aspirations.

The Trust also commissions and undertakes influential research, which underpins our project and policy work and draws attention to key issues on our agenda, helping to promote change. We have published over 30 studies in five inter-linked categories: university access; school access; international comparisons of education; educational philanthropy; and social mobility generally.

Perhaps our most influential research study was undertaken by the London School of Economics, which confirmed my observations that things had got worse over the last few decades. The research showed that social mobility in Britain has declined. It was easier for a child from a less privileged background born in the fifties to move up the ladder than it was for a child born in the seventies. And international research shows that the UK has the lowest level of social mobility of the thirteen advanced countries for which there is data. A major reason for this decline, the study concluded, was that increased educational opportunities have disproportionately benefited the children of affluent families, particularly in terms of access to university. The report was instrumental in thrusting the issue of social mobility into the centre of the political stage and making it one of the key political battlegrounds.

Much of the Trust’s research work in the area of access to university – crucial for a socially mobile society – has been aimed at addressing the misconception that the under-representation of non-privileged youngsters, particularly at highly-ranked institutions, is due solely to their inferior academic achievements. Entry to Leading Universities (2000) and The Missing 3,000 (2004) dispelled this myth. Based on data from the Higher Education Funding Council, these analyses demonstrated that even when account is taken of students’ prior A level attainment and subject choice, state school students do not gain their expected number of places at top universities. In fact, the work highlighted that each year there are around 3,000 pupils from the maintained sector who achieve the grades necessary to go to one of the thirteen highest-ranked universities, but who, for a range of reasons, end up elsewhere. This means that a student from a state school must achieve two grades higher at A level than a student from an independent school to have the same probability of attending one of these institutions.

This finding was reinforced by our latest report, which analysed over one million university entrants, and found that differing levels of admissions to top universities cannot be attributed solely to differing levels of performance between schools. We are not in any way suggesting this is due to any deliberate bias, but is more concerned with inequalities in the education system, and a lack of aspirations and appropriate support in many state schools.

The Trust remains committed to projects with a clear focus on widening access to research-led universities, not least because graduates of these intuitions make up the lion’s share of those in our leading professions. At Oxford, for example, as well as the annual programme of residential summer schools – which now reach over 250 students annually – we run a host of other initiatives. These include the Ambassador scheme, which targets students from state schools with no history of sending applicants to Oxbridge, and takes them through four years of residential and day events leading up to university application. The aim is not only to support the participants, but that these students will also act as “ambassadors” for the university, encouraging their peers to take part in various outreach activities and, ultimately, to consider making an application to Oxford.

We also support a one week bridging course at the university, intended to prepare young people who have not taken further mathematics at A level but who have met the conditions of their offer to study mathematics, statistics or computer science. The broader aim of the course is to make Oxford more attractive to applicants with one maths qualification – disproportionately those from poorer backgrounds and in less high-performing schools. Indeed, the decline of key subjects such as maths, languages and science in parts of the state sector is a growing concern, and one the Trust is looking to address.

More widely, the Trust is also looking to build on our original summer school model, but to extend our help to young people through projects that are sustained over a longer period of time. A good example of this approach is the academic enrichment programme, which we piloted at Durham University and which, with funding from the Goldman Sachs Foundation, we are now rolling out to universities in Birmingham, Manchester and Nottingham. The programme will benefit around 1,000 students over three years. It targets 16- and 17-year-old students who are bright, from non-professional backgrounds with little family tradition of higher education, and who attend state schools with a low rate of progression to university. The programme begins with a summer school, which is followed by revision sessions, leadership training and personal development programmes. Participants are also paired with a student mentor to provide support and advice. We have high hopes for this initiative as the pilot project at Durham was a tremendous success, and are looking to expand and develop the model in more universities in the UK.

As a donor and someone committed to change, the question I always ask is: “are we having an impact and making a real difference to young people’s lives?” Thus all our projects are thoroughly evaluated by independent researchers and our interventions are grounded in robust evidence. Recently, the Boston Consulting Group also assessed our portfolio of projects by looking at the quantifiable returns on the investments we make. They found that, on average, every £1 spent on our initiatives results in a financial benefit to those who take part of a present value of £15. Most commercial companies could only dream of that level of return. Plus there are the wider benefits – to an individual’s health, well-being and to society – which the analysis does not quantify but which are nonetheless significant.

However, we cannot afford to be complacent. Despite the progress that has undoubtedly been made in the last decade – which means there are more young people from state schools, poorer areas and lower social classes at university – we are fighting the tide and there are signs that progress has stalled in recent years. Home admissions to Oxford from state schools were just 54% in 2005/6 – meaning that almost one half of the university’s students come from schools which account for just 15% of A level entries.

So ten years on from its foundation, the Sutton Trust’s goal of improving Britain’s shockingly low level of social mobility remains as critical as ever, and makes us more determined to make a substantial difference in the next decade.

Sir Peter Lampl is the chairman of the Sutton Trust, which promotes social mobility by providing educational opportunities to non-privileged young people.