The government’s social mobility adviser Alan Milburn says the professions are letting down young people from poorer backgrounds and need to widen their intake.
Mr Milburn, Labour’s former health secretary, is critical of professions like the law, medicine and journalism for failing to open their doors to disadvantaged students.
In a report for the government, he says more effort is needed to ensure teenagers from state schools receive work experience in professional jobs.
The report says 83 per cent of jobs created in the next decade will be in the professions, which ought to provide an opportunity for the sort of social mobility seen in the 1950s.
Mr Milburn’s main findings are that “the golden opportunity for a social mobility dividend – as a result of professional job growth – is at risk of being squandered” and that “there is social engineering at the top of the professions and little evidence of change in social intakes at the bottom”.
Mr Milburn was brought up in a County Durham mining village by his single mother and went to a comprehensive school before attending Lancaster University. He said: “If social mobility is to become anything other than a pipedream, the professions will have to open up.”
Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, who appointed Mr Milburn, said opening up the professions was “key to ensuring that it’s not just the school you went to or the people you know, but your talent and knowledge, that gets you in”.
Mr Clegg said although progress had been made in some professions, “clearly there is a huge amount more to do” and there had to be “a step change in professions like medicine, journalism and politics”.
Mr Milburn concluded that routes into the professions, such as internships, were a “lottery” and that employers were recruiting from “too narrow a range of universities and regions”.
He said that barriers to fair access to the professions had not been broken down. These include poor careers advice, limited work experience opportunities, non-transparent internships, antiquated recruitment processes and inflexible entry routes.
Despite Mr Milburn’s concerns, some progress has been made:
* Top employers are opening up professional jobs to non-graduates.
* The government is producing a code of conduct for fair internships.
* All sectors have set up schemes to improve social mobility.
* Since 2009, the number of privately-educated senior civil servants has fallen from 45 to 27 per cent.
But while the legal profession is making efforts to widen its intake, it is “socially exclusive” at the top. Of 114 high court judges, 83 attended private schools and 82 went to Oxbridge. Among law students, 41 per cent are from the highest socio-economic groups, with 21 per cent from the lowest groups.
Medicine lacks the “galvanised effort” needed to open up recruitment, with 57 per cent of students from the highest groups and only 7 per cent from the bottom. Of medicine and dentistry students, 22 per cent are from private schools.
Jobs in the media are overwhelmingly filled by graduates and it is a “socially exclusive” sector. Among journalism students, 49 per cent are from the highest groups and 14 per cent from the lowest. Looking at senior journalists, 54 per cent are privately educated , with a third graduating from Oxbridge.
MPs are from “disproportionately well-off backgrounds”, with those attending private schools making up 35 per cent of the 2010 intake.