Just 6% of our doctors and our barristers come from a working class background. I used this fact when asking my first question at Prime Minister’s questions last week (it was my first question to the PM as names are drawn by ballot) calling for a renewed focus on social mobility.
Trying to improve social mobility has been central to my career to date. In my last job I expanded a small London-based charity serving 200 young people in London to a national charity with 7 offices around the country serving 7,000. We targeted young people who were bright but from low-income families and supported them into professions where who you know is often as important – if not more so – than what you know. We also created a Social Mobility Employer Index to rank the employers taking most action to recruit more people from working class backgrounds.
There are people who think that whatever the problem, the answer is that Government must ‘do more’, by which they usually mean spend more money. But the fact that our leading professions have become so unrepresentative of the country at large is actually more complicated than that. Yes, the education people receive is important, but it does not alone account for why usually between 40% and 70% of our country’s leading institutions come from private schools even though they only educate 7% of the country. Indeed, various studies show that even when young people do as well or better than those from more privileged backgrounds, they still end up with worse education and employment outcomes.
When work experience only goes to the relatives of employees or clients, those without connections can’t build up their CVs. When internships are unpaid, only those who are from affluent families can afford to do them. When an employer only recruits from a small handful of universities which themselves are unrepresentative, they are likely to only hire those who are more privileged. And when recruitment practices are judging essentially whether you are middle class enough so the company feels you are ‘suitable to put in front of our clients’, it puts polish over potential.
When I was on the Social Mobility Commission, we would produce reports into what was going wrong in professions and how to fix it, although journalists did not tend to cover what we said about their profession – only 11% are from a working class background and 94% are White - they were always better at writing about the lack of diversity of other professions rather than their own! In fact few places have a great track record on social diversity, including politics. It is up to employer practices, not just Government, to fix it.
