Civil Service Fast Stream

You think white middle class males are disadvantaged in life? Maybe take a look at the world around you, instead of reading nonsense online.

Yeah must admit the lazy journo got me. I answered in good grace. Silly me!!

You copy and paste in the job description and person spec using a white font - AI finds all the keywords and passes the application to next stage rejecting the hard working honest person who could be the best person for job.

My husband got in the accounting FS, he is white, middle class with three Oxbridge degrees.

I would say almost the entire process was online. Tests online. Then he had to do video interviews where he basically answered written questions to a blank screen, not to a real person or panel. This was back in 2016 or 2017, I don't know if it's still like that.

Did your DS go to private school and a Russell Group uni?

Yes I agree. I’ve worked at Home Office, Foreign Office and what used to be Ministry of Justice and found exactly the same.
It depends on the level of application and candidate I suppose.

DDs advice would be to practise the initial tests (not just the examples on website as real ones get much harder as you progress) particularly any weaker areas. Unis often have banks of resources for practise. Prepare for assessment centres and final selection boards really thoroughly especially if there is a subject knowledge test (it will contain questions you haven't seen from 1st year).

Yes but when you look at the stats for the higher grades in the CS, you'll see that white men are disproportionately higher.

There are a lot of women and ethnic minorities in lower grade jobs in the civil service but it gets a lot whiter and a more male the higher up you go.

I don't have the stats to hand but I worked for the Treasury which is particularly white and male (and young) and they published stats on it each year.

This made me laugh. My teenage son often meets his friends for a matcha green tea at a cafe in town! It cracks me up as I was downing pints at his age. I'm about as 'working class' as you can get & got very lucky around 18 year's ago when my employer (local council) paid for my Social Work degree & I would 2nd what over people have written about how Social Work is definitely a way to give back (it takes a lot from you too but that's another story). I'm happy the civil service are trying to 'level up' or whatever you call it.

Just be happy they’re not povvos cluttering it up with Lidl non organic full fat milk and Aldi white sliced bread.

I've been in the civil service a decade - the vast majority of my colleagues are white middle class men, then white middle class women.

I got in on a temp contract then made permanent

All the interviews are STAR and are name blind I am sure your special little boy will be fine, if he is good enough.

As well as the fast stream don't forget to look at Other Government Departments/Arms Length Bodies who may run their own graduate or apprentice schemes.

Anonymising unis isn’t crackers, it’s hugely necessarily for all the reasons discussed.

Saying my parents couldn’t afford to support me at anything other than the local uni isn’t going to get you far on any list.

DS did an internship with HMRC after leaving university but decided it wasn’t for him and ended up getting a much better offer from a local authority who were also willing to fund a professional qualification - this allowed him to move up job role wise quite quickly - he’s now early 30s and a much higher earner than most of his peers

Definitely apply, I work with younger men and women who have gone through it and they really are people who are good at their roles. And middle class, white and male will not go against him. The CS is much more diverse than even 20 years ago when I joined but it still is mostly white middle class men at the higher grades.

Oh yes I see it's been linked. As other have said, it's only the internship though.

i applied for the internship last year. They didn’t ask for my degree or university. It involved 6 hours of maths and “personality tests”. I got above average in maths and below average in personality (the questions were very odd!). And I didn’t get through. Tbh it really put me off the civil service because I work so hard for my degree and then they don’t even ask for it and base of some nonsense

I do agree with you that work can be disadvantageous in intense degrees and that there is a squeezed middle that are not poor enough to be eligible for support or rich enough to be funded by their parents. Also that there is a regional difference regarding cost profiles (someone brought up in London can live at home) I don’t know divorcees playing that game, but it doesn’t surprise me. Thats loans though. I was talking about hardship bursaries from the universities themselves. They aren’t widely advertised, but they do exist for those in desperate need, especially at richer institutions. I know nothing about the details of these.

Nevertheless, I was using an Imperial as an example of a global top 10 institution, where getting a 2:1 is more challenging than at a low ranking university with low admissions grades. The degree class is therefore not comparable. There are plenty of universities in between and students are perfectly capable of explaining their choice. To me, anonymising that data is crackers. Admissions teams need as much data as possible to get a full insight into a person’s achievements and capabilities.

@Castaneta DCs experience is same as my white middle class DD. She only applied to internship to practise the test as it cautioned few spots for non disadvantaged but got a place.

Internship students don't get that much advantage (skip one stage). Best advantage is an Oxbridge degree their success in my DDs stream is 3.5 times the average (clearly they score well on the tests).

Apologies if that link to today's BBC piece has already been posted. Haven't yet RTFT.

All the internship does is it exempts you from the very first stage of online tests for the fast stream: numerical, verbal reasoning etc that you did anyway when you applied for the internship. You still have to plough on through the rest of the gruelling tests. A nice bonus, but it is not like other city internships where you are given a return offer if you complete a successful summer internship.

I know he would be an asset to the civil service but as a white, middle class man with a humanities degree I feel as though the odds are stacked against him before he even applies

I don't think this is true. A lot of my students (prestigious university, social sciences) apply to the civil service fast stream. It's certainly very competitive and some extremely strong candidates are not successful. But some are successful, including white middle class men. Dont't put him off!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3ez3v9v8jqo

One of my DC is a fast streamer OP.

Other application avenues that are clearly monopolised by the privately educated rich hence the government bringing in these new measures which doesn’t solve the problem and just make things even harder for those in the middle.

I forgot to mention that he did the internship there the year before. There were lots of questions about diversity on the application and he didn’t tick any of them. But he still got in, the application was pretty tough as well.

When he got there, he said most people working there were actually white middle class from ‘good’ universities, despite all the diversity questions on the application…