How to get social mobility right

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). We met two Spectator staff members from working class backgrounds, who told us about the benefits, networks and opportunities they gained from the Social Mobility Foundation scheme. Both now work at the Spectator and Fraser Nelson (an SMF board member) told me this was nothing to do with social outreach but a matter of merit: ‘we hired both because they were the very best available.’