Moving on up

A social mobility ranking, the end of the industrial strategy and Cummings in the House

Rishi Sunak used Wednesday’s budget to level up in all directions—from moving part of the Treasury to Darlington to being pictured at the top of the stairs above his taller colleagues. But analysis of the chancellor’s day in the limelight overshadowed an interesting Higher Education Policy Institute paper about a different kind of levelling up.

The Hepi paper, by David Phoenix, vice-chancellor of London South Bank University, proposes a Social Mobility Index to measure how far universities help their students to progress and to act as “an antidote to the detrimental pressure of newspaper league tables”. If social mobility is regarded as a crucial outcome of education, it says, there should be a way of measuring how far institutions are achieving it.