Milburn, Mobility, Mentors

Rachel Carr

We were – very briefly! - on the news this weekend. Alan Milburn visited IU last summer (see photo) when the government’s Fair Access to the Professions report was launched from our North Kensington Centre. The BBC covered the (somewhat controversial) story of his appointment as Social Mobility Tsar by replaying the footage.

And I am delighted that it was seen by one of our first five mentors who got in touch with me to congratulate us on what we have achieved since her involvement with IU in 2003. Ingeborg is now a Senior Research Analyst. Back in 2003 she was a student at Imperial College and was paired with one of our teenagers who is now finishing her degree at University of Birmingham. In 2003 our pilot mentoring scheme had 5 university students from Imperial matched up with our students – today we have 370+ mentoring volunteers from across the University of London and our corporate partners. Another of those first five mentors – Spencer - came to work for IU before going on to train as a secondary school teacher. It would be good to hear from the other three – anyone know what happened to Joy, Angela and Hannah? We’d love to know.