With Brexit on the horizon, it's time big business started doing its bit for social mobility

Political events in the past year have re-framed Britain’s national dialogue, prompting us to re-examine not just our country’s relationship with the world, but our dialogue with each other here in the UK.

Brexit highlighted a frustration with economic growth and lack of opportunity that cannot be ignored. Corporations in the UK have a role to play in helping to address these concerns.

Support for education and job skills is the obvious starting point.

Education and skills are the foundation of the economy, holding up its enterprises, households and communities. Without a strong pipeline of talented individuals with fresh ideas, companies – big and small – risk losing their edge. Starved of different perspectives, their vision will narrow. Cut off from the well of energizing ideas, they will struggle to keep pace with a rapidly changing world. The result: an introspective Britain, struggling for relevance in a dynamic global marketplace.

This is why social mobility is so important. Britain has got hidden talent. It is the job of big business – working with government and schools – to encourage and nurture it.

The 10 pillars of the Governments new industrial strategy

Of course, it is right that in a “sharing society”, businesses “give back” to their local communities.

In any meritocratic society which believes that a young person, whatever their background, can succeed through effort, application, and enterprise, businesses have an important role to play in addressing society’s inequalities. It can never be acceptable that a young person’s fate is decided by their postcode.

It is an unpalatable truth, however, that if you are from a lower income background, you won’t have access to the same educational opportunities, cultural circles and professional networks, and you won’t be able to make as informed choices about future careers, as your peers residing in more affluent areas of the country. While the UK is a world leader in generating prosperity, according to The Legatum Prosperity Index, it is not great at sharing it.

The ambition of business – in partnership with government organizations and education – must be to enable those young people to compete on an equal footing.

The first measure is to support better access to quality education, particularly for those from low-income backgrounds. Many businesses already make truly transformative grants and fund projects and research to help boost educational achievement for pupils and young people on free-school meals. The top 50 Corporate Foundations made grants totaling £232 million in 2014/15, according to the Association of Charitable Foundations. This funding serves a vital purpose, but its only one part of the solution.

To compete effectively with their peers, young people need early, practical exposure to the world of work. They need to be able to imagine themselves in a job which may, at first glance, seem alien and beyond their skills and experience. They need contacts – a professional network to help them make the imaginative leap.

The Social Mobility Commission’s State of the Nation report published last year found that, above all else, it is the absence of these networks, internships, work experience and the chance to build the wider skills “necessary to impress employers” which holds students back.

This is where the business world has the greatest opportunity to make a difference. When school students spend time in our offices and when we spend time in their classrooms, a special kind of chemistry can occur.

I have witnessed the incredible ripple effect that happens – through the class, year group, school and wider community – when employees work with young people on a shared business project.

Projects like the J.P. Morgan Schools Challenge, where employees mentor students as they are challenged to come up with innovative solutions to problems affecting their communities using new technology, bring an exciting new energy to the classroom. J.P. Morgan also runs a programme with the Social Mobility Foundation. Every year, 50 sixth-form students take part in a two-week work placement which includes key skills training, pairing each student with a J.P. Morgan mentor for a year.

These projects are effective because students are exposed to the relevance and economic value their academic subjects have beyond the classroom.

By placing them in the shoes of an entrepreneur or an employee, we lend a new lease of life to their studies and can uncover hidden talent.

During the J.P. Morgan Schools Challenge, at a school in east London, I joined J.P. Morgan staff for a series of classes on business and entrepreneurialism, examining how a business plan works. There was one boy who seemed especially resistant. He didn’t want to contribute and told me that his only long-term interest was to become a footballer. Later on, during one of our lessons, out of nowhere, he made the most amazing observation about how the maths works in a business plan and very clearly explained it to the rest of the class.

For the rest of the lesson, I kept referring back to him, highlighting his contribution. The teachers tell me that he has spoken about that incident for months. It has given him a completely different perspective. He didn’t realise that he had the best mathematical business brain in his class.

If these partnerships have the power to transform students’ lives, they also bring huge benefits for business. Improving educational standards and job skills in their communities naturally boosts the local pool of talent available to firms.

Big business today needs resourceful problem solvers who can help to make their organizations a little more fleet of foot.

If large, multinational companies continue to hire the same Oxbridge graduates as their rivals, they will statistically continue do no better than any of their peers. To compete effectively in today’s dynamic and fast-moving economies, business must go out and find the brightest, most creative and differentiating minds in the world.

By making this commitment, there is an even bigger potential pay-off for society. As the UK exits the EU and goes it alone on the global stage, an added focus on social mobility – improving the chances of students from low-income families – could provide the spark for a new, much-needed generation of British entrepreneurs.

That was the lightbulb moment for my students and our employees as we sat around discussing the concept of a business plan in east London on a rainy Friday afternoon.

The plan allowed for employee costs, which are steady and grow slowly; and then also for an entrepreneur, risking everything, who generates not only annual profits but also a multiple of those profits as the value created in the business.

In an instant the class could see a parting of the ways: to imagine only a straight, level road ahead of them or to imagine a more aspirational, entrepreneurial path, leading to unlimited possibilities. Their eyes shone at that idea.

If we can encourage the business talent of this country – sometimes diffident, sometimes undiscovered – to understand the risks, rewards and, ultimately, joys of entrepreneurialism, then the prospects for innovation, job creation, community well-being and the U.K.’s continuing global relevance will be on sure footing.

Paradoxically, the seeds of the UK's future economic success are to be found in its current, pressing social challenges.

David Lomer is J.P. Morgan’s Co-Head of Mergers & Acquisitions for Europe, the Middle East and Africa