End school elitism over jobs - MPs

Yahoo News, 21st July 2009

Bright children from middle and working class families are missing out on professional jobs because of continuing "elitism", a Government-commissioned report has warned. Skip related content

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 just 7% 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 Gordon Brown to examine the barriers to entering the professions.

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

The report will show that while up to nine out of 10 new jobs in the future will be in the professions, they are currently drawn from a relatively narrow section of society.

It will say that the typical professional of tomorrow will be growing up in a family that is better off than seven out of 10 families in Britain, while occupations such as the law and finance are still dominated by people from independent schools.

Currently 75% of judges and 45% 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.

You can analyse figures as much as you like but I don't honestly think that the secondary school you attended really matters when it comes to employment after you have graduated from university. I'm inclined to believe that independent schools are better at preparing their students to pass the admissions tests for courses at elite universities than state schools do because the independent schools have staff who know the good tactics to use to get into university. What matters the most when trying to build a professional career is not what school or university you went to but who you know or who knows you. The real advantage children who attend independent schools have over children who attend state schools is that they are more likely to encounter classmates who's parents or relatives are in professional careers. The perceived higher quality of the education provided by independent schools really does come second to the personal connections with people in professions or high society one can make.

The gap is beginning to widen between state schools and independent schools because an increasing number of independent schools are changing from GCSEs to IGCSEs which are better quality qualifications. State schools cannot offer IGCSEs because they don't comply with the NC.

I certainly second your viewpoint that it's the personal connections and hidden curriculum that independent schools offer that is more important than the classroom education in timetabled subjects.