Why social mobility starts with the person

What we’ve learned about social mobility

For many students, the story about what they can achieve is written long before they ever apply to university.

At Middlesex, 98% of our London students are from backgrounds underrepresented at university, including ethnic minority and low-income communities. They have complex lived experiences that are often undervalued – by educators, by employers, and sometimes by themselves.

We are Kim and David, two colleagues at Middlesex who share a conviction that this lived experience isn't the thing holding students back, it's the very thing that equips them to succeed.

Here’s what we’ve learned.

Meeting the student who changed everything

I’m Kimberly Chadwick-Reaney, Deputy Director of UK Student Recruitment & Marketing. For me, it took one individual to re-shape the way I think about the work we do.

During a career session with some students, one young man told me that he had never heard of some of the careers, let alone believed they were an option “for someone like me”. He was care-experienced, from inner London. He didn’t lack ability or ambition, but no one had ever helped him see it in himself.

It really stayed with me, how could this capable young man, think he couldn’t, just because of where his journey began?

That moment changed everything about how I approached my work. I stopped starting with careers and started with the individual: their strengths, voice, and lived experience. I focused on building confidence and self-belief before we ever talked about job titles.

By the end of our time together, he told me he would be an F1 Engineer. I really hope he is.

Experiences like this stay with you because they challenge how we design what we do. They make it impossible to ignore the need to move beyond bolt-on support or isolated interventions. Not adding more but embedding it in ways that feel real and relevant.

At Middlesex, we draw on students’ voices and experiences to shape our work, using their lived experiences as their superpower.

The skills they develop navigating complexity, responsibility and challenge are the ones we value most.

From The Boys project

From The Boys, a project recently launched at Middlesex, shows what this looks like in practice. It brings together teenage boys to explore their experiences of growing up today – themes like masculinity, identity, misogyny and sexism – and gives them the platform and tools to do something with them. By creating their own podcast series, they’re developing confidence, critical thinking and a stronger sense of identity. It is co-creation in the truest sense. We don’t arrive with any answers – everything starts and ends with them. That’s because when we give students agency, not just access, that’s when real change happens.

Bringing the right people together to make change

This is David Gilani, Head of Access and Participation. What Kim is describing – starting with the individual rather than the intervention – is something we’re embedding in our practices here at Middlesex.

I've worked at Middlesex for a number of years and watching our students cross the Graduation stage never gets old. Given that we bring such a high proportion of historically underrepresented students into higher education, we have an even greater responsibility to support their success. As the first person to hold my role here, that responsibility is what drives me. Our job is to redesign the University to fit our students, not to ask our students to reshape themselves to fit us.

Working with student partners

We’ve set up a Student Partnership Board with our Students' Union, where paid student partners critique our existing plans and help shape activities. The students help us ask whether our plans make sense, whether they’re the right ones, and whether we're solving the real problem or the one we assumed was there.

What I find most valuable about this is that students feel empowered to challenge us honestly. For example, when we wanted to review our online academic skills module for new students, we brought it to the Student Partnership Board.

They immediately challenged why all the different topics had to be bundled together, instead advocating for short, on demand videos that students could return to whenever they needed. That has meant sometimes uncomfortable but always important conversations that have changed our direction.

Another principle is that we try not to layer additional activities onto students from underrepresented backgrounds and expect them to do more to overcome barriers that we should be removing in the first place. Instead, we look at how we can redesign things for everyone. For example, we schedule students’ teaching time across no more than three days giving students the stability to fit their studies around part-time work, commuting and caring responsibilities.

Perhaps the biggest shift has been moving from the idea that access and participation belong to one team, to genuinely believing that who gets in and who succeeds once they’re here is the responsibility of everyone in our community. Through our new Access and Participation Interventions Fund, colleagues from across the University can bring forward their own ideas for addressing the barriers their students are facing and they get support and funding to test what works. The people working directly with students every day are often best placed to know what needs to change.

Starting with the young person

Together, we’re calling for everyone to make a simple commitment, even if the work can be complex. To keep starting with the young person, genuinely listening and looking for ways to remove the barriers that affect them.

At Middlesex, that means continuing to embed student voice and co-creation into everything – across our own institution and in our partnerships with schools, colleges, local councils and employers.

Our internal commitment alone isn’t enough. This must be matched by system changes to funding and policy. As a university rooted in our community, we’re determined to make opportunity more equal, locally and beyond.

Together, we can turn ambition into action. Not by designing opportunity for young people, but with them.

Find out more about Careers and Futures at Middlesex University