Julie Randles on why getting more state school kids into accountancy matters

Getting into the top professions is a really competitive process, and your odds are a lot better if you’ve been to private school or to Oxbridge. Redressing that balance is a challenge. But once you see the talent of those in state schools who are ready to meet it – as I’ve been doing in my first couple of months at the Trust – you realise how important it is to enable those young people to engage with the professions.

That’s something the Sutton Trust has been pushing for almost 10 years; our seminal research into the backgrounds of top professionals has highlighted how professions like law, politics and the media are dominated by the privately educated. A group which only represents 7% of the population provides 76% of judges, 54% of leading journalists, and 32% of MPs. These findings encouraged us to start our own ‘access to the professions’ programmes, including Pathways to Law,

One profession that is increasingly keen to change the profile of its workforce is accountancy. Access Accountancy, which the Trust helps to manage, emerged in response to the 2009 Milburn report which identified accountancy as the profession that had seen the biggest decline in social mobility between the 1958 and 1970 birth cohorts. More recent research suggests that these barriers persist, with up to 70% of graduate recruits to the accountancy profession educated at selective state or independent schools (compared to 11% of the population as a whole). It follows in the footsteps of the PRIME Commitment, which the Trust has supported since its inception in 2011, and which now has over 80 member firms.

Following a busy summer, during which Access Accountancy signatory firms delivered over 500 work experience placements to students from disadvantaged backgrounds, we brought these firms together last month to share best practice and encourage other firms to take action on social mobility. Sacha Romanovitch, Grant Thornton’s CEO and the Chair of the Trustee board, talked about her own social mobility story, and those of a number of the other Access Accountancy trustees who would likely struggle to access careers in the profession today.

Member firms agree to offer a certain number of work experience placements to disadvantaged students, and to work together to deliver a common message in schools. But perhaps one of the most important elements of the Access Accountancy initiative is the commitment to collect socio-economic data on applicants and hires to the profession. Without this data it is impossible to measure the impact of the work that firms are doing to improve access. It will be an invaluable indicator of where the main access barriers lie, helping us to decide what to do to change things in the future.

PRIME and Access Accountancy are both really good initiatives, and underline our belief that sector-wide collaboration is essential to closing the access gap to our top professions. However, more still needs to be done – a recent report criticised both accountancy and law for a lack of transparency, noting that “barely a third of top law firms report social mobility data according to job type”, and “leading accountancy firms do not publish social mobility data publicly”. The report also highlighted the issues around current recruitment processes, namely that “current definitions of talent can arguably be closely mapped onto socioeconomic status, including middle-class norms and behaviours.”

However, having more socially inclusive professions is a necessity if the UK is to continue to compete on a global stage – a report from the Boston Consulting Group, commissioned by the Trust, has estimated that failing to improve low levels of social mobility will cost the UK economy up to £140 billion a year by 2050 (or an additional 4% of GDP). And some firms are starting to change their recruitment processes – in 2013, Grant Thornton stopped automatically screening out applicants based on their academic results, and have seen good results – 11% of their 2014 trainee intake wouldn’t have been able to apply previously. Similarly, Deloitte has removed school and university information from applications, implementing a contextual admissions process instead to remove unconscious bias.

Initiatives like PRIME and Access Accountancy are therefore an essential first-step on the road to more inclusive professions, but if we are to become a more socially mobile society, professional organisations will need a new approach to graduate recruitment to ensure that they hire the best person for the job, regardless of background. It all adds up to a good deal for both the professions and for young people.

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