Last night I went to the launch of a report I’d had a small hand in shaping. Smart people on the panel. Sharp questions from the floor. A room full of people who genuinely care about fixing social mobility in the UK.

And yet I kept coming back to something that happened seven months earlier, in a room in Leeds.

Last autumn I sat in that Leeds room as part of the UN Global Compact Network UK’s regional consultation on social mobility. What I liked most about how it ended wasn’t the discussion – it was what came after. We were asked to write down something we’d actually do.

It’s like a spell. You write it down and it becomes real.

I wrote that I’d send an open letter to government with three concrete things that would make apprenticeships work better for SMEs. And I did. You can read it here.

I’m not sure that happens at most events in this space. Panels, report launches, roundtables – plenty of good thinking, not always a lot of follow-through. The Leeds consultation felt different and I think that’s worth saying now the full report is out.

The report – Unlocking Regional Barriers to Social Mobility, published by the UN Global Compact Network UK and supported by Slaughter and May is linked below – I hope you read it.

It’s honest about what isn’t working. Fragmented initiatives. Short-term funding. An apprenticeship system that’s theoretically open to everyone but practically designed for organisations with dedicated HR teams and procurement functions. The Social Mobility Commission puts the cost of unequal opportunity at £39 billion a year in lost productivity. That’s not an abstract number. That’s what we’re collectively leaving on the table.

The regional lens is where the report does its best work. Social mobility doesn’t look the same in Leeds as it does in Glasgow or Exeter, and solutions built around national averages tend to miss the places that need them most. West Yorkshire sits mostly in the “middling” category on the Social Mobility Index – not failing, not thriving, opportunity concentrated in Leeds city centre while surrounding towns have weaker transport links and fewer local pathways in. That’s consistent with what we see working with employers across the region.

This isn’t a new observation for us. We’ve been making the case for Yorkshire businesses to take social mobility seriously for years – and the data keeps pointing in the same direction.

Who Is The System Actually Built For?

Where I’d push the conversation further is on who the system is actually built for.

Around 61% of UK private sector workers are employed by SMEs. About 9 million of those work in micro businesses – fewer than 10 employees. A small agency. A local firm. A business where every hire is a significant decision and navigating levy transfers and apprenticeship frameworks is a genuine ask on top of everything else.

That’s where most people in this country actually work. Not in the firms whose logos appear on conference lanyards. In small businesses up and down every high street, industrial estate and business park in the country.

The report acknowledges this. It flags that SMEs lack the resources and knowledge to engage. It calls for clearer guidance, better signposting, regional hubs that reduce the burden on smaller employers. All of that is right.

But I think we need to go further. Design the system from the SME up, not the enterprise down. Local and regional government – combined authorities, metro mayors, devolved institutions with real economic mandates – are the actors with both the reach and the accountability to build skills infrastructure that actually gets to small businesses and the people working in them.

Enterprise CSR matters. Large employers doing the right thing matters. But it’s voluntary and uneven and it will always be shaped by the priorities of the institutions doing it. It can’t carry the weight of fixing this on its own.

The Levy Is AThe Levy Is An Opportunity – If We Get Implementation Right

The Growth and Skills Levy replacing the Apprenticeship Levy this month is a real opportunity. The report is right that implementation is now the decisive factor. The three things I asked for in my letter to ministers last year – full funding for SMEs, early wage support, readiness training for host teams – are still the practical changes that would reach the businesses the system currently struggles to get to.

We’ve written at length about why the levy, used well, could be genuinely transformative for smaller employers. The question is whether the implementation matches the ambition.

Where The Optimism Lives

I’m genuinely optimistic about where this is heading. The report is serious. The regional consultations were serious. The willingness to name structural problems rather than talk around them is more than you usually get in these spaces.

But optimism has to be located somewhere specific to mean anything. For me it’s in whether the people building what comes next include enough voices from organisations that work directly with smaller employers – not just enterprise, not just policy, but the providers and regional delivery organisations who see the friction points up close.

The Spell

So here’s my ask. Not just a comment or a share. Find a piece of paper – an actual piece of paper – and write down one thing you’ll do differently for the people in your organisation or community who the system isn’t reaching. Keep it somewhere you’ll see it.

If you want to share it in the comments too, even better.

But the paper is the spell.

Crispin Read is CEO of The Coders Guild, a Leeds-based digital skills and apprenticeship provider. He was part of the UN Global Compact Network UK’s regional consultation in Leeds in autumn 2025 that contributed to this report.