In many of the better paid professions you need to fit in to get on. Top of everyone's list is being absolutely bright as a button with the best exam results there are. The City does have a lot of law firms and other bodies with very very bright people who worked their way up from comprehensives - a true meritocracy from the Essex boys dealing shares to others. The issue is whether it is getting harder to move up from poorer backgrounds.
One question is whether it is simply the recession therefore it is hard to get on. My three privately educated graduate children have not found it easy. People ight think I can ask friends to give them jobs but it doesn't work like that. You start in front of a computer screen spending half a day doing online entries determined by UCAS points and only once through all that might you get an interview and usually employers don't even reply and this is to reasonably posh clever graduates. It's a blood bath out there for jobs as it was in my day - applied for over 100 jobs when I graduated just about top in my year when we were in another recession.
If things are harder now if you have the academics but you don't dress right, say you was and haitch, wear the gold chains, don't wear tights (law student my daughter noticed who came in for work experience - why the girl couldn't see that only secretaries have bare legs and copy the other legal staff I have no idea, she obviously wasn't blind)... then that needs to be addressed.
Of course there will come a time when social mobility has been so very good that only those who have a very low IQ and we do not therefore want doing brain surgery etc will be left in poverty. In other words very successful social mobility might in due course naturally leave a sub-IQ underclass and that would be a testament to social mobility having worked. We have not reached that position yet.
I think we need the teaching of grit, failure, stoicism and the like in some of the worst state schools. We need ability for those from poorer backgrounds to be able to operate without sleep, to keep going whatever and all those skills. We need to drum out of them any sense of being entitled and hard done to. We need them to be able not to complain and make a fuss about things and work very very hard. we need them to be bright enough to watch youtube videos of the professionals they want to be - to copy their clothes, accents and interests to get on. On the High Earning Mothers thread people will say those of us who have got on are typically able to do this kind of thing - feign interest in football or handbags or whatever gets you the client.
In 1940s Newcastle in a very rough area my mother taught classes of 40 children. She drummed into them the right way to speak, what was right in terms of how to speak in interviews - Never you was, or haitch. No political correctness saying - your local accent is wonderful, keep it up. We could certainly do more of that today. Ensure the applicants whose CVs are rejected if there is one single typo realise how important that is when 1000 apply for every job.
Discrimination legislation based on class or even weight or ugliness or being short is not the way to go. It is lawful to reject a candidate who speaks so badly clients will reject them and I see nothing wrong with that. There is nothing to stop a working class candidate adopting the accent, grammar and spelling and clothing of those who succeed in that particular profession.