Civil Service internship. Only children of the "working class"

[Quirkswork]

If your child is coming up for 14 and interested in a career in the Civil Service and you have a job in a profession or that means you pay a lot of tax, I suggest you down tools now.

As reported in the Telegraph,

Civil Service internships will only be offered to students from lower income families in a bid to make Whitehall more working class, ministers have announced.

Only young people from “lower socio-economic backgrounds” will be able to apply to Whitehall’s internship programme, the Cabinet Office has said.

A student will be judged eligible depending on what jobs their parents did when they were 14. Students with parents who are receptionists, electricians, plumbers, butchers or van drivers would be among those eligible for the programme.

Civil Service fast-track applications are down lately, maybe the usual candidates are applying more to grad schemes elsewhere for more money. Maybe they have data looking at how many ‘middle-class’ applicants have done the internship then gone to a different sector.

I think it’s a good thing. The civil service has always found ways to attract diverse candidates, this is just the latest thing.

If at 14 your single mother was a basic grade nurse then you are MC (bad). If at 14 your father was a plumber whilst your mother was a receptionist who ran the business and together brought in a six figure income, enough to send you to private school, then you are WC (good) and need a leg up.

Yes, define class. Is it how many books you have? Or whether you know how to lay a table. Or drink tea with your pinky out or in? Or vote Tory or Labour or Reform?

Being 100% genuine, do you think it’s a good idea to be making policies on employment opportunities for people based around something we can’t measure but ‘you absolutely know what it is’?

I felt a disadvantage when I applied years ago. I interviewed well but the sort of verbal reasoning tests we were asked to do were looking back, the kind of things that would be bread and butter to you if you had been to grammar school or a competitive private school.

Also it was before such things were available online or in any way easily practicable or accessible for someone like me from a working class, comprehensive, first person to go to university (ex poly) background.

The legal profession can be snobby and I certainly faced snobbery and anti-Northern attitudes, but City law was actually easier to get in for someone like me at the time than the civil service, at least in terms of a graduate level position.

It used to mean something but it doesn’t anymore. It is ridiculous all the these wealthy people who claim to be working class. My grandmother grew up in poverty and married an immigrant man who worked down the pit- god help you if you described her as working class- she was as ‘middle class’ as you got.

And being working class is?

What if your parent is Deputy Prime Minister but when you were 14 she was a single parent union official?

Senior civil servants are primarily made up of upper middle class.

Won't make much difference

How does one know if they have entered into the ‘upper middle class’

I’m not sure that completing a tax return gives you an insight into opportunity across the civil service… I do accept potential to have moved to a better area may confer some advantage However, the point here is that social mobility is about more than one element of background.

I’m not sure what criteria is being applied in this case however, I have seen criteria previously that include eligibility for FSM, parental employment (targeting skilled manual and below), school attended (targeting non-selective state) and parental qualifications (targeting first gen uni students). A multimillionaire lottery winner’s child may qualify and I would still say that is fair and right:

This!

Is it to do with shopping at Boden? Or Waitrose maybe?

Who knows, but we don’t like them, down with upper middle class people and their children! Do we go after grand children yet?

And many would say it does not.

Yes, Stalin hated the petit bourgeois in particular. It was eliminating them that led his nation into starvation.

I have offered one set of criteria used above.

• parental occupation (skilled manual &below)
• FSM (received)
• first gen uni
• non-selective state school

applicants meeting one or more of the above criteria would be invited to apply or be guaranteed an interview if they applied.

If you think that there is no such thing as class and society is merely composed of tribes, then you are middle class.

It may help some people and it may shift the Civil Service make up a bit. But increasing diversity is not easy. The application rate from ethnic minorities for the fast stream seems poor - probably language skills (one really needs very good English) and starting pay is less attractive for anyone who feels it important to start earning. Also some degree subjects like computer science pay better elsewhere and it's less usual for science graduates to join the generalist fast stream: it was much more populated by PPE, English and History grads in my time.

Surely you can just get around that question on the application form?
’Is society merely composed of tribes?’ Yes/No

Your class is not determined by your awareness of it.

Any idea what it is determined by?

Various factors, status, wealth, education, culture and so on.

Some are clearly subjective, but others (e.g. wealth, income etc) less so

it was level playing field starvation though.

I worked in the civil service for many years and nepotism was rife. The term ‘working class’ seems to be coming from the Torygraph article rather than the official scheme documents. I think it is a good idea and long overdue!