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.

Im all for widening participation and increasing social mobility, but i am a bit baffled by the list of jobs that seem to qualify / not qualify.

It's a blunt instrument. Like any cut off point (e.g. FSM)

This measure isn’t looking at FSM but class. So a bricklayer and care worker on a combined income of £60k are far more able to provide all those things than a single nurse or IT worker yet their kids would be excluded.

Also from the picture on the bbc article you’ll see it’s the median socio economic group who are the most under represented in the CS.

Then maybe the Civil Service should make some TikToks or YouTube videos telling us all what they do and anyone interested can apply from all backgrounds.

That's exactly what this scheme is trying to combat - children of low paid, often low skilled workers who gained few qualifications at school who would previously not have had a chance of work experience/internships with the Civil Service on the basis of what their parents did, the children's accents, the schools they went to, the fact that they don't have a friend's Dad who could sort out a place for them or ask a mate at the golf club if they could take on their sister's kid so they have something interesting to put on their CV.

It's about equity, not equality. Equality means that those already standing tall remain taller than the other kids. Equity means that they stand level.

If your family are hard up surely you will be out working alongside study from sixth form onwards. My DD worked at KFC because she wanted spending money - and she wouldn’t qualify for this scheme. This gives you something “interesting” for a CV - showing you have worked in fast food proves you have grit! She had no contacts to get into KFC - they recruit all the time and they pay.

Income is part of 'class' but not the only one. Hence looking at parental occupation at 14, highest level.of parental education etc

Yes which is ridiculous as the chart I linked to clearly shows.

Yes that is baffling. It should be based on income, and then maybe job title as an additional filter

Wanted or needed?

DD has a Saturday job because she wanted the spending money.

She didn't need it to.pay for basics, because I pay for the basics. She was therefore able to step away when exams were coming up, for example, and focus on her studies.

And if the child's dad has a healthy income but chooses not to share that money with his family?

If like me, I'm a single mum, later in my career, had a child late, and have a reasonable income but am on my own, paying the mortgage and all the bills by myself.

Labour's scheme can never be fair without knowing each child's individual circumstances, which they cannot do.

It's a fundamentally unfair and divisive policy. It will only earn them intelligent people's contempt.

I’ve never heard anyone talk like this in a non p!ss take way

Sounds excellent to me. I live in an area with one of the highest levels of social deprivation in the country. A child from a deprived background will not usually have parents who have connections that can smooth the child's entry into the adult world of study and work. They are not less intelligent than children who have certain advantages, but they may well have fewer opporunities. I see the kids round where I live with their bright lively faces making their way to school past the heaps of fly tipping and past the street drinkers and wonder what subliminal message they take in about their self worth.

So anyone who agrees with the policy is 'unintelligent? 😂

Oh dear, why not debate the points raised?

It’s social mobility, not social engineering.

I work in a role (private sector - construction, engineering) where I do a lot of work to attract young talent to our degree apprenticeship and graduate programmes. The roles are absolutely open to everyone, however before I arrived, every single cohort each year was full of kids whose parents work for us, those who went to private school or had parents in professional roles. They were also mainly white, males. (Nothing wrong with white, males btw, my son is one).

The recruitment process was really narrow and actually seemed to exclude anyone who wasn’t in one of the groups above. So , I started a programme of Outreach, which meant choosing specific schools to partner with. They were generally schools with a high number of pupils on free school meals, girls schools or schools with a very diverse group of young people. I arranged lots of different events for the students to show them the types of opportunities that are available in our industry. Things like careers events, tours, meet current apprentices and work experience. I actively excluded fee paying and grammar schools. The reason why ……….. Their parents, on the whole, will have a wider network to call upon to enable their children to access things like this and they are less likely to struggle to obtain a decent job, apprenticeship or graduate role.

All of this does not mean that we now only employ from the schools we target. We still take a larger percentage of those young people who come from what I would say is a bit more of a privileged background. However, we now have young people getting opportunities that they may never have known about. They are just as competent and hard working.

I remember an old HR Director at another company, who was a qualified solicitor , with both children in private school. She was moaning one day that her DS couldn’t access a particular summer school that a large law firm was offering, as she went to a private school. She moaned that her DS could miss out on valuable experience for when it came to applying for a law apprenticeship. I did remind her, that one of her best friends was a judge and the other a barrister and she had lots of contacts with law firms. She had a huge amount of privilege with her contacts and basically picked up the phone to secure her daughter a summer placement with a ‘mates’ law firm. Does a cleaner, receptionist or bin man have that kind of network - probably not, so their children don’t have as many opportunities.

Social mobility does not exclude the privileged kids or those who have professional parents or went to private school from getting a good job and having a fantastic future. It just gives those from a less privileged background a few opportunities.

The policy is deciding who can apply on the basis of what their parents did as an occupation when they were 14. It’s pretty hard to argue that this is an intelligent way to field the best candidates.

It’s another nail in Labours coffin.

This is great news. You can't be what you can't see.

Why not, I think it’s a good thing.
I wouldn’t say having a parent who is an electrician puts you in a low earning household, my sons an electrician and I know a few, they earn loads!

But this isn’t doing that. Loads of kids of tradespeople in our local grammar, and other jobs on the list. We have lots of immigrants in our area who are highly represented in grammars and many work in the care sector x 2 . It’s a good family income which funds trips back home and access to additional cultures. Absolutely nothing against that but please don’t tell me the children
of brick layers and carers aren’t in grammar schools and are automatically underprivileged, they’re not.

Makes sense - it does sound like that there aren't a huge number of people in your social circle or work environment that grew up in poverty.

I've only ever heard piss taking of it by people speaking from a position of advantage, too.

It depends what you mean by 'best'.

In this context, it seems 'best' is those young people unlikely to have an opportunity to explore a CS career, despite being qualified for one.

Which correlates to their parents occupations.

You’ve made a good point there.
older parents will have had more time to climb the ladder in whatever field they are in. Younger parents wont

The advantage then goes to the younger parents kid
Which is wrong

So many holes in this policy when we start to dissect it
but that’s Labour for you

My point is it’s pretty easy to get work experience to put on a CV if you are motivated without contacts from the local golf course and many employers will have great respect for anyone who has worked in a basic entry level job. This will then give many of the soft skills needed for a role at the level of a university graduate. Don’t any “working class” youngsters, er, work?

Maybe that's why they're doing this. The majority of the top civil service officials were privately schooled after all!

This is fine. It is a short summer placement to get more lower income background people to consider the Civil Service's leadership development scheme, where they are massively underrepresented.

You do not need Civil Service experience to get a place on the Fast Stream so I would not say it confers advantage. It just gives you a taster of what the work is like and whether you enjoy it.

It is better than the existing intern scheme, that uses race/ethnicity as a proxy for class, but actually attracts a lot of people from high income/professional middle class backgrounds.

If there is a criticism to be made of this, it is that it is only for undergraduates.