Many of us will have heard the news this week – it seems that some sectors are deliberately favouring upper class applicants for jobs within their companies.
Accountancy, sadly, is one of these sectors, according to results from the government’s social mobility watchdog , where top accountancy firms have found to be “systematically” excluding working class applicants from their workforce.
The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission has report shows that 70% of job offers from elite accountancy, financial services and law firms in last year went to graduates who had been educated at in private or selective schools.
Alan Milburn, commission chair, said;
“This research shows that young people with working-class backgrounds are being systematically locked out of top jobs.
“Elite firms seem to require applicants to pass a ‘poshness’ test to gain entry. Inevitably that ends up excluding youngsters who have the right sort of grades and abilities but whose parents do not have the right sort of bank balances.”
However, the report did note, that the accountancy profession did support more flexible routes to qualification, with the CIPFA being singled out as being one of the UK’s professional accountancy organisations that backs the Association of Accounting Technicians.
It is not too long ago that we wrote about the inequality in wages between gender and this is also something else that has to – and no doubt, will – change.
As the commission said, this report was a “wake up and smell the coffee moment”; let’s hope that employers take note and going forward, some form of action can be taken if it is found that candidates have been selected not on merit and hard work, but purely by background.
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