Door to top professions still closed to poorer children

Published on Tuesday 21 July 2009 21:59

BRIGHT children from middle-class and working-class families are still missing out on professional jobs because of "elitism", a government-commissioned report warned yesterday.

The report, by a cross-party panel chaired by former Cabinet minister Alan Milburn, calls for urgent action to break "closed-shop mentality" which, it says, still characterises the professions in Britain.

The panel found more than half of all the top professional jobs were still taken by candidates who were independently schooled, even though they accounted for only 7 per cent of all schoolchildren.

Failure to break this pattern will, it says, mean that the opportunity of achieving the most significant wave of social mobility since the Second World War will be lost.

The panel was originally set up by Prime MInister Gordon Brown to examine the barriers to entering the professions.

In more than 80 recommendations, it argues that enhancing social mobility must be the top social priority for any government, now and in the future.

The report shows that, while up to nine out of ten new jobs in the future will be in the professions, they are currently drawn from a relatively narrow section of society.

It says that the typical professional of tomorrow will be growing up in a family that is better-off than seven out of ten families in Britain, while occupations such as the law and finance are still dominated by people from independent schools.

Currently, 75 per cent of judges and 45 per cent of senior civil servants were independently educated.

Among the measures it recommends for tackling the problem is a new army of young professionals and university students to mentor young people and a national "Yes you can" campaign, headed by inspirational role models, to raise aspirations.

It also calls for an overhaul of work experience programmes.