Give all young bright sparks a chance to soar

RESEARCH by the Sutton Trust has found that the UK’s leading professions are still dominated by people who were educated at private schools.

It focused on those in prominent positions in their professions and found that 71pc of barristers, 61pc of doctors and 51pc of journalists were privately educated.

This comes as little surprise. The UK has one of the poorest rates of social mobility in the developed world and the OECD estimates that rising inequality knocked a staggering 9pc off UK GDP between 1990 and 2010.

The education system undoubtedly has a vital role to play in working to ensure equal opportunities f or young people from all backgrounds. However, as the research demonstrates, improving the UK’s record on this issue is not just the responsibility of our universities and schools – businesses must also radically rethink the ways in which they attract, recruit and retain talent.

Many organisations have already taken steps towards improving equality of opportunity. At Deloitte, we have introduced school and university-blind interviews and we are using contextualised academic data to allow our recruiters to make more informed choices about candidates. We have also committed to significantly increase the number of higher apprenticeship positions available through our Bright-Start scheme.

Nevertheless, we acknowledge a perception exists that the professional and financial services sectors remain a ‘closed shop’. This perception is not helped by a lack of data. According to the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, more organisations have a strategy in place to improve social mobility than have a means to measure their current diversity in this area.

But without such data, how can businesses and the Government understand the scale of the problem, assess the impact of initiatives to address it or set targets to measure progress?

The argument in favour of transparency is compelling. We only need to look at the debate around gender diversity and gender pay to see its impact. For example, the collection of data on the number of women in British boardrooms brought greater scrutiny to the issue and, in part, contributed to the Davies Review setting a target that 25pc of board members should be women. There has been concerted action from across business on this issue and improvements have been made.

I am certain that the Government’s requirement of companies to publish their gender pay gap will have a similar impact.

Transparency drives change, so it is important that the same principle applies to social mobility.

That is why we have decided to become one of the largest employers in the UK to publish our social mobility data. This is based on a survey of more than 1,000 of our staff, representative by grade, gender, ethnicity, office location and role.

Our data shows that 43pc of our partners and people attended a non- selective state school, 16pc an academically selective grammar school and 20pc an independent school.

The remaining 21pc of the sample attended a school outside of the UK or chose not to disclose. Of those who responded, 51pc were the first in their family to go to university, while 9pc received free school meals.

WE HOPE that by publishing this data we can go some way towards showing that a career in our firm, and in our profession more widely, is open to all.

Only by creating a culture of openness and transparency about the issues businesses face can we ensure people f eel comfortable talking about their own experiences of social mobility and any challenges they face along the way.

We have the potential to make a real difference to the future of the business community, but to get there we need to ensure greater collaboration among organisations working to break down barriers to progress.

Transparency can be a powerful tool, and in publishing our data we urge others to do the same.

David Sproul is senior partner and chief executive of Deloitte