Today’s report from Alan Milburn’s Commission on Social Mobility found young people from working class backgrounds are being ‘systematically locked out’ of top professions because they fail the ‘poshness test’. The figures are stark: 43 per cent of newspaper columnists, over half of senior civil servants and a staggering 71 per cent of senior judges in Britain went to private school which educate just seven per cent of the population.
It’s common for organisations and businesses to focus on the gender, race and disability of their recruits but some are leading the way on social background too. Tristram Hunt and I recently visited The Spectator, which has long taken work experience students from the Social Mobility Foundation (SMF).
