Discriminate against old etonians for jobs, says ex-education chief

Kate Ferguson mentions Justine Greening’s keynote speech at the Carnegie-Sutton Trust ‘Best in Class 2018 Summit’ in the Daily Mail. 

Employers should shun Old Etonians and give jobs to state school candidates with the same grades, a Tory former education secretary has said.

Conservative MP Justine Greening urged bosses to do more to give under privileged youngsters a hand up. She said where applicants have the same grades employers should give the job to the candidate from the struggling state school because they are more ‘impressive’.

Ms Greening, the Tory MP for Putney in London, went to a comprehensive and her remark will be seen as a barb against some of her former Cabinet colleagues. Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson went to Eton where he was two years above his future Prime Minister and boss David Cameron.

Speaking made her case at a summit on social mobility organised by the Sutton Trust in New York, according to the TES.

She said: ‘Contextual recruitment basically says when you’re looking at someone’s grades who’s applied for a job to you, look at in the context of the school they went to.

‘You can easily do this, there’s software to help you as a company. So if you get three Bs from Eton, you’re probably not as impressive as somebody who gets three Bs from the school in a part of the country where the school [wasn’t] doing well.’

‘That needs to be much more sophisticatedly used by companies to start looking at the quality of candidates and the potential candidates that are applying to them for careers and jobs.’

Ms Greening said contextual recruitment would allow companies to ‘stop fishing in a talent puddle and start fishing in a talent pool’.

Read the full story or watch Justine Greening’s speech.