This will never be a fair country while middle-class children get all the perks
This will never be a fair country while middle-class children get all the perks | Heather McGregor | Comment is free | The Observer
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Two weeks ago, 20 adults from several different organisations assembled in a building at Heron Quays in London's Canary Wharf. Half an hour later, they were joined by 12 recent graduates, who had two things in common. They were all from ethic minorities and they were all finalists in a process to select six participants for a 10-week, paid training scheme which would give them both job-seeking skills and experience of different workplaces.
Both the day itself (modelled on graduate recruitment days run by investment banks and other big graduate recruiters) and, for the successful ones, the 10 weeks will give them more confidence and more familiarity such a process, which itself will help them find employment.
While also funded entirely by private donations, this is a slightly different project to the work experience now infamously being offered at the Conservatives' Black and White ball, where one wealthy parent even donated £4,000 for their offspring to spend two weeks at Tatler.
Why were so many people required to identify the successful six at Heron Quays? Because the assessment day format calls for several different exercises and interviews and is very labour-intensive. But for applicants whose families often speak limited English, let alone know how to prepare their children for workplace interviews, a 30-minute, one-on-one interview, such as offered to most potential interns, would never be enough to showcase their potential satisfactorily .
I own and manage an executive search firm. We are not high volume, but our assignments are high quality. In its 29-year existence, this company has placed more than 1,000 people in well-remunerated positions. We have an excellent track record in placing equal numbers of men and women and will be all too ready to sign up to a code of conduct such as that suggested for headhunters in last week's Davies report, an assessment of why there are too few women in Britain's boardrooms.
But for the best jobs, we have never been able to find enough candidates from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds. Why is that, in a country which has recently had 13 years of a government committed to narrowing the social divide?
I believe it is because the real barrier to social mobility is not the abolition of the grammar schools, as many have claimed, nor the introduction of tuition fees, whatever the protesters say. It is the undocumented, unchallenged growth of unpaid internships and work experience placements through which thousands of school and university students gain experience of the workplace. This in turn helps them secure the first steps on the ladder of their careers. Work experience makes a CV more attractive; for this reason, most schools require year 11 students to arrange at least a week of it after their GCSE exams.
But, as ever, money and access govern which work experience opportunities are available to which parts of the population. And I am not just talking about the select few who "bought" work experience for their children to fund the Conservative party. I mean the thousands of work experience placements and internships, almost of all of them unpaid, which well-connected parents who are able to support their children working for nothing are able to arrange. These give already privileged youngsters a head start on their career, while making the playing field even more uneven for others.
Of course, it is not surprising that parents want to help their children secure these placements. In a report published in January, the UK's largest recruiters were questioned about the value of work experience when it comes to assessing students' applications for graduate roles with their organisations. Three-fifths of employers stated that it was either "not very likely" or "not at all likely" that a graduate who'd had no previous work experience would be made a job offer. But it is an injustice.
And even if you want to do something about this, it is challenging – and expensive. My company used some of its profits in 2007 to develop and trial the 10-week training programme to equip ethnic minority graduates to go out and find their own entry-level jobs in the PR and communications field. This, we hoped, would one day in the future yield us a more diverse candidate base of the type that many of our clients had requested.
When we formally launched the programme in 2008, we recruited our initial trainees from the University of East London, an institution where 17,000 of its 20,000 students are non-white. But then we hit a problem.
It was not enough to provide the premises, the trainers and the careers guidance; if we wanted to make this programme truly open to people from all social backgrounds, then we had to pay them.
Few parents in the ethnic minority communities of east London could afford to have a working age child, who they had already supported through a degree course, do something full-time for 10 weeks unpaid.
There are charities which recognise this. Career Academies UK offers mentoring and guest lectures in 120 schools and colleges and, most important, a six-week paid internship between years 12 and 13. But with youth unemployment at almost 1 million and rising, initiatives such as this, and ours, can only scratch the surface. They will not turn around the juggernaut of privilege that is well on its way, fuelled by tens of thousands of unpaid and/or parent-brokered internships each year.
We're never going to stop parents wanting to the best for their children, nor should we. I'm guilty of it myself. I have helped my children find work experience and then supported them while they work unpaid. But the very real, and yet largely hidden, barrier to social mobility in a country whose top recruiters value work experience in their applicants, is the lack of a transparent and accessible way for all young people to secure work experience, not just those whose parents have money and connections.
Every business owner and manager should be engaged in trying to dismantle this informal work experience system, regardless of their political views. Companies can always find excuses not to take on paid interns – "we are too small", "we can't afford it" – but as a nation we are storing up a lot of trouble for ourselves if we don't equip our young people for the workplace.
Other European countries such as Germany and Holland have long recognised this and are pulling way ahead of us in productivity and economic recovery. Ask not for whom the bell of rising youth unemployment tolls – it tolls for us all.
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Here's something else odd. There are certain internship placements that, because of the huge cost and/or connections needed to get them, necessarily scream "over-privileged mummy's boy/girl and probably a gak-fiend to boot" (the UN in NY is one). Despite this being pretty much common knowledge, I've never seen an employer reject someone because of it. Though I have seen someone rejected because she had a bunch of crappy jobs followed by one awesome one and "c'est qu'elle a couché" ("she obviously slept with someone to get it"). Given a choice between the two, I know which one I'd pick.
I'd also reject on principle any kid who boasts about their experiences abroad resulting from having been born to ex-pat parents, but who can't manage two words in any of the local languages. Again, I am in the minority here.
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