On 21 July, the Fair Access to the Professions report, Unleashing aspirations, was published. Chaired by Alan Milburn MP and set up by prime minister Gordon Brown, it drew together 19 independent experts from the professions and two independent social mobility experts.
The panel took six months to deliberate how to ensure fair access and it received over 13,000 pages of evidence. It published more than 80 recommendations and now waits for the Government's response this autumn.
Writing exclusively for The MJ, panel member, Katherine Kerswell, Northamptonshire CC chief executive, reveals a set of key points every council should pay regard to while waiting for the Government's response.
We have some excellent practice in recruitment and selection and positive action initiatives in workforce reform, but it would not be realistic to suggest that every council is as good as each other. We must continue to learn from each other and see how we can improve our practice, particularly now in the recession, when quality staff will be critical.'
The panel soon learned, much to its surprise, about the size of the local government workforce, which now stands at 2.25m employees, and the range of excellent practice it has built up over the years, for example, in creating career pathways, funding degree programmes, and changing job roles to become bridging opportunities to gain access to professional careers.
As the largest employer in the country, and usually within each of our localities, we have a leadership role to uphold in ensuring we embody the best practice in recruiting and developing the best talent to work for our councils. I have always felt that equalities-driven recruitment, selection and workforce development practice made the best business sense, as we were ensuring that we got the best people, and we developed our best people into being even better.
Local government was a major recipient of the outputs of professional training and accreditation by institutes, but it did not award professional status on to individuals.
As a single employer, we probably incorporate the widest range of professionals, for example, teachers, civil engineers, children's and adults' social workers, archaeologists, accountants, lawyers, planners, librarians, architects, environmental health officers and transport engineers.
We also require a high proportion of graduates which lead into those professional qualifications and careers. Therefore, practice by the professions is of direct relevance to us and we can exert a powerful lobbying voice and influence if we feel collectively that access is becoming less fair.
The premise of the report is that it should be long term in nature, and is focused on the fact that up to seven million more professionals are likely to be needed in Britain by 2020 as the global economy expands.
A new focus is, therefore, needed to unleash aspiration in all children and make social mobility the number one social policy priority for this and future governments.
We have a wellbeing power which challenges us to think what we can do to improve the economic, environmental and social wellbeing of our localities. I believe this report directly taps into that power, and its analysis and argument should be considered by us as to how we can continue to deliver real quality of life in our communities.
The creation of the panel has sparked strong debate in the national media and its report has had a similar effect. It is a cross-party report, independent of the Government.
The report is challenging in some of its analysis and its conclusions. It created many strong exchanges between the panel members over the direction we should be advocating and what the analysis really meant.
Social mobility should be a key issue for us all and rightly, should generate such an exchange.
