David Lammy - Guardian Higher Education Summit

Good afternoon everyone.

In recent months, the future of higher education has received its fair share of attention. That’s due partly to the independent review of tuition fees that will start this year, but partly also thanks to the debate on the future of higher education that John Denham launched last spring.

I’m not going to talk much about the debate today, because it's still too early to draw firm conclusions. But I will say that a number of themes have already emerged from it.

For example, there's a clear consensus that higher education must have a role in almost all areas of life. The starting-point is teaching and research, but excellence in these areas must underpin a role for universities in local economies, in public policy making, in international relations, in sustainability and building a low carbon economy, and in knowledge exploitation.

It’s also clear that there must be an increasing focus on diversity as the needs of students and businesses become more varied and as universities specialise in areas where they are really excellent.

And it follows from this that more attention will be paid to the ability of university leadership to determine and implement strategy and manage risks.

You’ll be hearing much more about this over the coming weeks. But today, I want to look towards the future from a slightly different perspective.

The economic downturn has, of course, had a significant impact on our vision for the future. After 10 years of successive growth, this summer’s graduates will face a new horizon. However, I remember graduating in a recession – and although I didn’t immediately get a job in law, I did get there eventually. When people ask me, was it worth being a student (and you’ll understand that, because I went to Harvard law school, I had debt well into the tens of thousands of pounds), I answer: of course it was! Let’s not forget that the working life of a graduate, leaving university at 21, is around 45 years!

So I maintain that they’ve done the right thing by choosing to go to university and that we’ll be doing the right thing if we seek to build on the work that’s been done over the past decade to widen access to higher education.

Right in economic terms, because the downturn won’t last forever, and when we come out of it, the new jobs that will be created will demand high-level skills. And right in social terms, not just because higher education can open the way to the most rewarding careers, but also because of its power as a transmitter of tolerance, civilisation and shared values.

Access has continued to improve steadily in spite of worsening economic conditions – a genuine success that somehow wasn’t picked up in last week’s enrolment figures. The number of applicants from higher socio-economic groups who were offered and accepted university places last year was 3.8 per cent up on 2007. But the rise in acceptances from lower socio-economic groups was more than double this, at 8.4 per cent.

This improvement is important - a degree is for life, and so are the better prospects that go with it.

I think that’s a cause for celebration, but I know that not everyone agrees with me. Some people have questioned the wisdom of our determination to expand access to higher education in view of the current state of the graduate jobs market. Others just think higher education and the life-chances it offers should continue to be the preserve of an élite.

Let me tell you why those people are wrong. About why the need to give more of our citizens – working adults as well as school leavers – a higher education is as pressing today as it ever was. And why it’s so important for prospective students as well as for the sector as a whole to continue to look beyond 2010 in coming to decisions today.

At the start of the 1960s, as the Beatles were emerging into public consciousness, and the civil rights movement was reaching its climax, only about 5 per cent of young people went into higher education. Higher education at that stage could be described with one word – elitist. It was the preserve of a minority of people were expected to go on to take the best jobs in society.

When I was born in 1972, that had risen to about 20 per cent. Britain was opening up – we were about to join the European Economic Community, and Spain and Marbella were becoming mainstream holiday destinations for a growing and aspiring middle class.

And today it’s 40 per cent. Higher Education has been transformed – no longer the preserve of the few, but a realistic option for tens of thousands of young people and adults seeking to further their opportunities and fulfil their potential.

Raising that further, as I believe we must, is going to be a tough nut to crack. And we’re not going to achieve it just by asking universities to tinker with their admissions policies. Indeed, I think there’s an increasing recognition that, to be fully successful, any effort to encourage more young people from all backgrounds to aspire to university and the professions into which it leads must start early.

It goes without saying that the onus for ensuring that this sort of encouragement and guidance is given usually falls on teachers. And we all know how may pressures teachers in maintained schools already work under. But at the same time, I know that the first priority of all good teachers, wherever they work, is to give the young people in their charge the best start in life they can.

All that is borne out by the new Teachers’ Attitudes Survey. This reaches some interesting conclusions about schools’ role in promoting progression.

It shows that, while teachers’ attitudes are important, they need to be supported by training if they are to be effective. I hear too many examples of sixth-formers who are told not to ‘waste’ an application on one of the more selective universities because the school has no record of success there and the candidate would feel out of place in any case. Or like the Cambridgeshire school that declined Cambridge University’s outreach activities for much the same reasons. We owe it to young people to encourage them to aim as high as they can – even if there are disappointments along the way.

The survey strongly suggests that the schools which do best in encouraging progression are those in which it is integral to everything the school does. It reinforces that school is not just about GCSE and A-Level grades – exams are, after all, for a purpose. And that purpose is progression way beyond the school gates. School leaders set the tone by pushing a consistent and clear focus on longer-term progression as a whole-school priority. But raising aspirations and promoting longer-term progression is a goal that must be shared by all staff.

I don’t think that’s very surprising. And neither is the fact that strong relationships with the wider community are helpful in encouraging young people to aspire to university. That includes not only parents and carers, but other local schools, further and higher education institutions, local and national employers and third-sector organisations.

The same focus on guidance and encouragement at a young age was evident in the National Council for Educational Excellence’s recommendations, with which many of you will already be familiar.

My Department and the DCSF are today publishing our joint implementation plan for those recommendations.

It sets out what is already being done by Government and the sector as well as the direction for future developments.

We agree that the earlier aspiration-raising activities start, the better. That means that primary schools and teacher must have a role to play. And, like the Council, we, too, see a need for closer links between schools and universities at every level. That will help schools, among other things, to offer their students better information, advice and guidance, as well as overcoming the social and cultural barriers to higher education that young people from less well-off backgrounds still face.

This plan reiterates the measures that we proposed recently in the New Opportunities White Paper. They include, notably, a commitment by my Department to work with DCSF to guarantee that, by 2012, pupils from low income backgrounds who are roughly in the top 50 per cent of performers get a comprehensive package of assistance to attend university. And we are committed to funding a higher education experience for pupils at Key Stage 3 level in our most deprived schools.

In the light of these things and more, I think we’re well-placed to succeed in getting a more varied selection of young people into our universities. And that’s all very positive.

However – as John Denham has pointed out – achieving a more diverse student population is only half the battle. If the great selling-point of higher education is the better chances in life that it brings, then fairer access to university needs to be translated into fairer access to the graduate professions.

I’m not talking about social engineering and I’m certainly not, as some people have claimed, advocating class war. I’m talking about the part we must play in creating a society where everyone can rise as high as their talents and application allow. Where their prospects depend on their aptitudes rather than on whether their parents were able to afford private school fees.

I’m talking about social mobility and social justice.

And I’ll take my own profession as an example. Research carried out by Michael Shiner on behalf of the Law Society in the late 1990s revealed a profession heavily biased towards privately-educated Oxbridge graduates. And it showed that Oxbridge graduates were 15 times more likely to get jobs with City law firms than graduates of other universities. So it’s hardly surprising that, today, 7 out of 10 top barristers went to private schools while only 1 in 10 went to a comprehensive.

The same sort of pattern is evident in the medical profession. About two-thirds of accepted applicants for medical degrees come from families with managerial or professional occupations.

And of the 10 most senior officers in each of the three branches of the armed forces, 9 in the army, 6 in the Royal Navy and 3 in the RAF were privately educated.

Something similar could be said about the other professions, like journalism or the civil service, too.

That’s why the Prime Minister has asked Alan Milburn to examine the whole issue of access to the professions. I believe that’s something the professions themselves will welcome, because no one has called louder for the professions to be opened up than bodies like the Law Society, the BMA or the First Division Association.

And it’s something those of us who are committed to giving more youngsters from less well-off backgrounds the chance of a higher education should welcome, too. Because the more representative the professions become, and the less frequently the name of your old school is either a lifelong millstone or an open Sesame, the more obvious the value of what we’re doing is.

Last week a suitably double-barrelled columnist was telling us class was a thing of the past. We should be concentrating on restoring working-class pride rather than forcing the professions to open up.

Well no one is forcing the professions to do anything, but it would be in their own interests, as well as those of society as a whole, to trawl a little more widely.

Wouldn’t they do a better job in difficult times if, barristers a better understanding of their clients, doctors a better understanding of their patients, architects a better understanding of where we live? Too many of them live their lives in a closed circle.

And it is hardly surprising if the professions aren’t even on the radar of teenagers in many comprehensives if they have never come into contact with anyone from those worlds. Working-class pride is a wonderful thing but it doesn’t pay the bills. Young people from these backgrounds deserve the same chance as everyone else to have a fulfilling career.

And when they get that chance, many of them grab it – this isn’t about dumbing down. Bristol University, for example, finds that the students it takes from the poorest-performing schools get some of the best degrees. King’s College London finds that the students it selects from inner-city comprehensives for its extended medical degree turn out to be outstanding doctors. Widening participation takes time and effort but it’s a win-win situation when we get it right.

Thank you for listening. If you have any questions I’d be delighted to answer them.