As a token pleb medical student, I can verify the lack of social diversity present in my even relatively socially diverse and modern medical school compared to other ones i.e Cambridge.
Only 2% of medical students come from lower socio-economic groups or what you would loosely label as working class according to some 2008 report. A significant proportion of our course is privately educated. However misconstruing state-educated as synonymous with poor is a common error. The majority of the students, either privately or state educated, regale stories of expensive gap years, have cars more expensive than I'll be able to afford for ten years (junior doctor wages aren't fantastic) and mostly come from medical/academic/professional families. Most of the students that access our medical school bursary are a tad bit fraudulent as their self-employed parents like fiddling with their taxable income, I'm currently eyeing up an Audi A3 of a student who gets the same full grants and loans as me.
The biggest barriers I personally faced as a daughter of a widowed bipolar alcoholic were accessing the required work experience for getting into medial school and lack of education towards polishing my UCAS application. Applying to medical school is very strategic and I only got in first time round to my 4th choice thanks to TSR and harassing many an irritating admin worker from HR in hospitals to admission departments. I had to ring up the volunteering services at my local hospital for five months just for her to send off the required CRB check needed before I could volunteer on the wards. I had to write to 52 consultants and 24 GPS to get shadowing experience. I never got taught how to write formal letters even in my shitty high school so I had to teach myself that basic task as well. I got my PS glimpsed at by somebody with no knowledge of applying to medical school who would not even proofread it for me.
We had poor career's advice in high school as well. One career's adviser told me outright to consider nursing rather than medicine because my grades weren't good enough to get in. My 5A*s and 4As at GCSE were inadequate supposedly, despite being the 3rd best results in the school year. They were not good enough for a large chunk of medical schools which is disgusting.
There's also flawed medical school entrance exams which are falsely presented as improving the chances of disadvantaged applicants being fairly represented. They're not, the UKCAT is a mere lottery designed to throw away a large percentage of the applicants so it can save the university's time. Both the UKCAT and the BMAT have plenty of expensive preparatory courses alongside the fact even doing the exams cost money. Getting reimbursed for being a pleb like me for these exams took so much time and effort. Never mind the expensive university interview outfits and travelling.
Medical school admissions like most universities are very opaque in nature and their hidden cut off points have to be researched. A medical school might not declare it on their website that their UKCAT/GCSE at A* % cut off point exists but it does. My GCSE results and UKCAT results since they were decidedly average for a medical student prevented me from applying to most of them. All medical schools spout that they understand that some students struggle to get work experience but THEY STILL REJECT YOU WITHOUT IT. I'm very lucky to have harassed my way into getting plenty of it.
The most heartbreaking thing for me is to see other privileged medical students getting in with AAB on results day when my medical school should have considered their less polished disadvantaged contemporaries. I have to work with these AAB students now and my academic 'superiority' is pretty apparent, their resourcefulness is poor and they depend on returning home to be harangued into revision. They struggle to retain information and rely on their overconfidence to swim through our history taking and patient examinations.