Sutton Trust

THE SUTTON TRUST

Sir Peter Lampl, Chairman of the Sutton Trust, explains how the trust promotes social mobility by providing educational opportunities to non-privileged young people.

The Sutton Trust has a simple but vital aim: to improve social mobility by providing educational opportunities to young people from non-privileged homes. Since I founded the Trust in 1997, we have run a wide range of innovative projects 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 £22mn to educational projects, directly helped tens of thousands of children and — by promoting policy change — indirectly affected the lives of hundreds of thousands more.

The trust’s inception

The roots of the trust can be found in my personal experiences. After attending state schools, I was fortunate enough to go to Oxford and then to the London Business School. After a stint with the Boston Consulting Group, I joined a client in New York. I 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, 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 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, which in my day admitted a number of brilliant working-class students from south Wales. The president told me that the college had hardly taken any such students in recent years. In fact, the proportion of Oxford’s intake from state schools had fallen from around two-thirds in the 1960s to just 46 per cent. It seemed to me that things had gone backwards.

I wanted to do something practical to address this waste of talent. So I talked to the Oxford admissions office about getting students from schools they had never heard from to a residential summer school — a concept I had come across in the States. An enormously successful week followed, and 16 out of the 64 participants got in. Buoyed by this I set up the Sutton Trust and expanded the summer-school scheme to other leading universities. The model was adopted by government, and summer schools are now run at the majority of UK universities as part of a £160mn programme. I realised that my own philanthropic giving could instigate much broader change.

Our approach

So that is how the Sutton Trust works: not as a straightforward grant-maker or think-tank, but as a ‘do-tank’. We commission and undertake research to highlight inequalities and propose practical solutions. We pilot innovative projects which have a strategic importance and the potential for wider roll-out. And finally, we evaluate projects thoroughly, so that others — notably government — can be persuaded to take them up. Most importantly, as a charity we have the freedom to think creatively and act independently.

Up until recently, the trust was funded entirely by my own money. Over the last three years, however, we have sought to widen the reach of our work by getting other funding partners on board. Some of these are for specific projects — the HBOS Foundation, for example, is supporting a scheme to nurture talent in west Yorkshire and the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation co-fund Into University, an innovative community project which aims to raise the aspirations of children as young as nine. But we have also started a Strategic Philanthropy Fund to allow donors who share our objectives to have a stake in everything we do going forward. By pooling their funds with our own, our projects can have a wider impact and there is greater potential for leverage with policymakers.

Our projects

Because disadvantage starts before birth and continues to the workplace, the scope of the trust’s activities is broad, starting with the early years, through primary and secondary school, to access to higher education and the professions.

Early years

Our priority here is to support parents in their role as primary educators, so as to narrow the disturbing gap in cognitive development between children of different social classes, which emerges as young as 22 months and widens with age. Our flagship project, Room to Play, provides a free informal drop-in and advice centre for parents and children in a busy shopping centre in one of the most deprived areas of Oxford. Because of its location the centre reaches particularly those families who are less likely to access the more formal provision of the social services and the local Sure Start Centre. The centre has had some excellent initial results, and we hope the initiative will provide a model for children’s centres to reach disadvantaged parents in other parts of the country.

Making schools fairer

At school age, the trust’s priority is on practical projects to help poorer youngsters access the highest performing schools and, more widely, advocating policies to create a fairer school system. Our research revealed that the top 200 state schools are highly socially exclusive, taking just 3 per cent of pupils on free school meals, compared with 15 per cent nationally and 12 per cent in the schools’ neighbourhoods. This work — and our analysis of the benefits of a national yellow bus scheme — has been highly influential on policy, contributing to the extension of free transport rights for lower income families in the Education Act and reforms to the School Admissions Code. On a more practical level, the trust also funds an outreach scheme at Pate’s Grammar School in Cheltenham, which supports children from the less affluent local primary schools to make successful applications to the school. A scheme based on this initiative is currently being piloted by the trust as part of the government’s Choice Advice programme.

Opening up independent schools

International evidence reveals the gap between the UK state and private education sectors to be the largest of any advanced country, so widening access to independent schools is an important piece of our work. Since 2000, the Sutton Trust and the Girls’ Day School Trust have piloted an ‘Open Access’ scheme at the Belvedere School, Liverpool. All places at this high-performing independent day school have been awarded on merit, with parents paying a sliding scale of fees according to their means. The first cohort of Open Access girls achieved the school’s best ever GCSE results — and the best in Liverpool — and the social mix of the intake now reflects the Merseyside area. The trust is pressing for the roll-out of Open Access to 100 or more independent day schools on a voluntary basis, as the most effective means of breaking down the barriers between the private and state sectors.

Access to higher education

The starting point for the trust was university summer schools to encourage bright youngsters from less well-off homes to apply to leading universities, where the problem of fair access is most acute. More recently, we have developed projects that go further back in a young person’s life and are sustained over a longer period. An example of this 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 as part of a £1mn scheme to Birmingham, Manchester and Nottingham Universities. The initiative will ultimately benefit 1,000 students and begins with a one-week summer school, followed by revision sessions, leadership training and personal development as well as student mentoring. We have high hopes for this project and are looking to expand the model to other universities.

Access to the professions

Inequalities at school and university have a knock on effect on our professions. Our research into the leading figures in politics, law, medicine, journalism and business has highlighted the dominance of those from independent schools at the highest strata of society. The Pathways to Law project is a far-reaching attempt to address this imbalance and to ensure the legal profession benefits from the talents of the brightest young people, regardless of background. The £1.5mn initiative comprises an innovative programme of advice sessions, mentoring and work experience for 750 students each year, supported by a substantial financial commitment by the College of Law and the backing of a number of leading law firms. If all beneficiaries over the life of the project gain training contracts they will form 13 per cent of the 6,000 solicitors who start the next stage of their training.

Social mobility

In all areas of our work, the trust uses robust research and evaluation to highlight issues and make the case for change. Our most influential piece of research is the work we commissioned from the London School of Economics on social mobility — or the extent to which a young person’s prospects are determined by their parents’ income. This study — which was released in the run-up to the 2005 General Election — revealed that social mobility in Britain has declined and is lower than in any other advanced country. These shocking findings catapulted the issue of social mobility into the centre of the political stage and gave renewed impetus to our efforts to increase opportunities for those from less-privileged homes.

Conclusion

In its tenth year the Trust has much to be proud of. A recent analysis by the Boston Consulting Group found that, on average, every £1 spent on our interventions results in a present value benefit of £15 to those who take part. Plus, there are the wider benefits that are not quantified — to an individual’s health, well-being and to society more generally — that are hugely significant. The trust has also moved on the debate in key areas — whether it is access to leading universities for non-privileged students, or the gross inequalities in schools.

But our education system remains shamefully unequal and our social mobility pitifully low. I recently visited Sweden and was impressed by their focus on excellence and equity. Enshrined in their Education Act is that ‘all children must have access to equivalent education, regardless of gender, place of residence and social and financial background’. I hope the work of the Sutton Trust over the next 10 years can bring the UK closer to that admirable objective.

Biography of Sir Peter Lampl, Chairman and Founder of the Sutton Trust

Peter Lampl is a graduate of Oxford University and the London Business School. Before establishing the Sutton Trust in 1997, Peter was a successful entrepreneur as Founder and Chairman of the Sutton company, an investment and private equity firm with offices in New York, London and Munich. Prior to founding the Sutton Company in 1983, he was a management consultant with the Boston Consulting Group in the United States and Europe and held a number of senior management positions at International Paper, the world’s largest paper and forest products company.