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.

So you've never benefitted from social engineering yourself, in the form of cultural capital, class/race/straight/able-bodied privilege, a family background that meant you were perhaps more able to study to the best of your ability, more able to afford to attend higher education, and more able to afford to rent or even buy a stable home once you started work rather than living in a mouldy HMO until your mid-40s or choosing between where you can afford to live and your career? Parents or good school advisors who could tell you how to format a CV, how to do best at interview, what to wear and how to fit into the workplace, because they did jobs like yours rather than working in Asda or being long-term unemployed?

Or is it only 'social engineering' when it's an attempt at helping those who might not have had your advantages?

I get that we parents like to have sharp elbows for our kids to get them the best of everything we can and its frustrating when one door is closed for them (even if hundreds of others are open)- but you can't live in a world where you think only about you and yours and not society as a whole. If we don't make efforts to create hope and meaningful opportunities for bright kids in the lower social economic groups it is bad for us all in resulting crime and mental health problems. Costs of benefits and support for those we fail to meaningfully engage into work- because if you don't get them young it is hard to change their path. Apart from anything else if you designed the most effective civil service you could would it not be representative of society as a whole? It is overweight in those with money and it causes problems.

I agree completely.

For what it’s worth, I work in the CS and am state-educated, and I don’t know of any colleagues in my current or previous roles who were privately educated.

However, lots of civil servants - especially those in senior roles - have been privately educated.

That’s not in itself a bad thing, but the CS does need to reflect the population it serves.

I think it sends out the wrong message when 7% of the population are privately educated, but 59% of CS permanent secretaries (the head civil servant of a department, so the highest rank of civil servant apart from the Head of the Civil Service) were privately educated, as per this report from 2019 - https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Elitist-Britain-2019-Summary-Report.pdf. There don’t seem to be any more recent stats on this, but I don’t believe it has changed very much.

PS - you can still successfully apply to the CS and progress in it if you are privately educated. Also, when you apply to a CS role, your educational and professional background is anonymised, so the vacancy manager can’t tell where you went to school and also doesn’t really care, in the nicest way possible!

That might be true for some professions, but not for the CS (I work in the CS).

Agree with all of this.

A scheme such as this is a small, small thing that can only ever very partially begin to mitigate a very few of the many disadvantages that WC kids face when trying to start out in a professional career.

To moan about a scheme like this is scarcely any better than moaning about free school meals only being targeted at those less well off.

Makes sense. Rich kids already get these kinds of perks through their parents. It's all about who you know.

I think you can do the internship in several locations across the U.K., not just in London, from what I remember when meeting previous interns who did it.

Did you see the list of jobs not counted

Fair enough, but generally this isn't the case for internships aimed at widening participation (and this is something I struggle with as someone involved in coordinating them in my industry)

Fuckung hell some people really get a kick out of stamping down on widows and orphans

Are you in the right thread ??

Oops I clicked “You’re not being unreasonable” by mistake.

This is a good thing.

Thanks, you’ve saved me the trouble of trying to say that less well!

As the saying goes, ‘When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression’.

There are lots of flaws here - class is incredibly hard to define - but its mere existence isn’t one of them.

It’s already been alluded to, but for absolute clarity - the Civil Service is NOT 59% privately educated. That was Perm Secs, the highest level, in 2019.

Average salary in the CS is about £34k, it would a pretty crap return on parental investment if 59% of us were privately educated 🙄

Like private schooling and unpaid London internships etc aren't social engineering

This government just keeps coming with the divisive spiteful nonsense, don't they.

Children should all be offered the same opportunities, NOT based on what their dad does for a job.

Sorry this is a really stupid comment. Its not arbitrary, how would you do it better OP? Of course people can have bad parents in any socio-economic situation, but you have to go with the majority surely. Nd even if you have terrible parents, you'll still probably come up on top. Thats just a fact. What's the saying, "I'd rather cry in my Ferrarri"

and mum

The internship programme was previously only available to people from minority ethnic groups so this isnt entirely a new thing. There is some reporting about working class people being “prioritised “ for the fast stream, but this is BS. Even for protected characteristics like race it is not legal to prioritise one group over another in this country, unless its a special case eg a domestic violence service aimed at a certain ethnic group. Being working class is not even a protected characteristic. I expect what they will do is try to remove invisible barriers that put working class people at a disadvantage.

No they shouldn't, because based on what your Dad does for a job you do get better opportunities from birth. Surely you realise this? I see it myself with my DC

Why are posters being sexist with just the dad’s job!!

When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression

Brilliant 👏

Well yes they should all be offered the same opportunities, but there’s no effective measures the government can take to stop the rampant social engineering of kids getting internships etc because of family connections.

That won't be an exact list and it's looking at the truly disadvantaged whose experience of places like Whitehall will be non existent.

Middle class kids have much more opportunity to see the workplace. It's not difficult to understand.