What can we do about ‘elitist Britain’?

Jo Faragher

A report that came out last week suggested that employers could – at some point in the future – be forced to declare the social background of their workforce.

The Rt Hon Alan Milburn’s government-commissioned report, Elitist Britain?, revealed that 71% of senior judges had attended private, fee-paying schools, as had 62% of senior armed forces officers and 55% of permanent secretaries.

An overwhelming percentage of senior public service roles, it found, went to people who had attended private school and/or an elite university such as Oxford or Cambridge. Milburn went so far as to describe this trend, though not new, as social engineering.

In his report, Milburn has urged employers to make changes to how they attract and recruit people into their business. Key among these is publishing data on the background of their staff and making sure that applications are ‘university-blind’ so hiring managers are not swayed by their higher education choices.

Savvy recruiters already do their utmost to ensure that shortlists are as fair and diverse as possible, promoting candidates’ skills and suitability rather than making a big deal about where they studied or who they were at school with. But Milburn is right that more can be done.

The danger of allowing this trend to continue – after all, it’s nothing new to hear that many top jobs are filled a tiny pool of well-networked people – is that organizations shut themselves off from different attitudes and approaches, and that stops them from being innovative.

A further suggestion of the report is that employers do more with schools so that they reach out to a wider range of candidates at an earlier stage, and also that they have more interaction with the communities they actually serve, particularly in the public sector.

As Milburn points out, if we do nothing, then we narrow “the conduct of public life to a small few who are very familiar with each other, but far less familiar with the day-to-day challenges facing ordinary people in the country”. And this benefits no-one, so it’s time for the guilty employers to step up and widen their horizons.