MARTIN EVANS

Home Affairs Editor

As laughable as it may sound coming from a Daily Telegraph journalist living in north London, I still consider myself to be working class. It’s all about your roots, innit?

I was brought up in a two-up, two-down in the North East. Dad was a fireman, my step-dad worked in a factory and my mother (or Mam as we say up our way) was a waitress. I went to a comprehensive school and was the first in my family to go to university.

So technically, I’ve got all the badges needed to qualify for the BBC’s new recruitment policy.

My children wouldn’t get a look-in though. They will have to fight it out with all the other middle-class kids in the ever shrinking pool of graduate schemes.

Even in 2022, class remains the one characteristic that too often defines a person’s life chances in this country. Social mobility is stalling and the cost-of-living crisis is only going to make things worse.

White working-class children persistently underachieve at school and the albatross of tuition fees means even fewer aspire to university. But what they lack in opportunity they often make up for in spark, determination and drive.

Schemes like this are not only a good idea, they are vital if we are to tackle one of the most lingering inequalities left in modern Britain.

So bravo BBC for lowering the ladder a little and recognising that true diversity is about more than just protected characteristics.