Justine Greening is MP for Putney, Roehampton and Southfields. She has held a number of posts in government, including Minister for Women & Equalities and Secretary of State for Education. Upon returning to the backbenches in 2018, she established the Social Mobility Pledge, a scheme aimed at broadening social mobility and opportunity in Britain. In this in-depth conversation, she reflects on her own experience of “climbing up the career ladder” from a working-class background, describes education's role in “firing up children's imaginations” about the wider world, and explains how the social mobility pledge is helping to close the achievement gap by encouraging employers to value talent over connections.

Your host is Tunde Banjoko OBE, founder of Making The Leap.