I was really pleased to be invited to be part of the NUS Poverty Commission. As principal of a further education college where the huge majority of students are from low-income families, I see every day, up close and personal, the struggle to climb the ladder of opportunity that so many face.

It’s not pretty, it’s not romantic and - shockingly - it’s not getting any easier, despite all the rhetoric about widening access over the past decade or more.

So it’s vital we look coolly and clearly at the facts. I’m glad to say that this is exactly what the commission did, receiving evidence based submissions and hearing from expert witnesses. You’ll see the quality of the work done in the final report. It makes for compelling reading.

The key fact is that there is still a cast-iron correlation between the level of income of the household into which each English child is born and their educational outcomes. No matter what your innate talent or ability, the lower your family’s income, the lower your chances of success.

Additional hurdles

In school, at further education college, and at university, working class students face all sorts of additional hurdles and far too frequently fall behind their peers.

We know this. We’ve known it for years. Most people would agree it’s just not fair. So why do we still find it so difficult to do anything about it?

My personal view is that we face two fundamental problems when we try and tackle this. One is that in a modern “knowledge-based” economy - education has become a political football. Having a more highly qualified population is now seen as critical for economic success, and for all of us qualifications have now become almost essential for making progress in the job market. This has placed the education sector in the front line of government economic strategy.

But instead of reaching a national consensus over what policies are needed to ensure a level playing field, political parties now compete with each other to come up with sound-bite initiatives. All politicians now proclaim loudly that social mobility is a top priority for them, but all offer different solutions, most of them only loosely related to the available evidence.

Proposals will cost money

At each election, new policies are unveiled, so that the education sector now resembles modern particle physics, with dozens of different types of institution flying around in a bewildering spin. The trouble is, very few of them deal directly with the barriers facing disadvantaged students from hard-pressed communities.

Which brings me to the second problem. The education system needs fixing, not rearranging. We need to put resources in to make it work for students of all backgrounds, not into inventing new types of school, college or qualification.

The Poverty Commission’s recommendations are straightforward: Fairer funding, better targeted support for students from low-income backgrounds and a renewed focus on flexible, affordable education for working adults. This will undoubtedly cost money, but it will be money better spent than the current system where huge amounts of resources are being wasted on superficial measures.

So thank you to the NUS, the voice of our students, for waving the flag for equal opportunity and fairness. Thank you for sparking renewed debate about our educational priorities. Sadly, despite all our efforts, it’s needed just as much as ever before.

Andy Forbes is principal and CEO of the College of Haringey, Enfield and North East London