Sue Gray was back in the news last weekend. The former top British civil servant has in fact rarely been out of the news since she unexpectedly quit to become chief of staff to Labour leader, Sir Keir Starmer, last year.
This time, the Mail on Sunday devoted nearly a whole page to the woman it called “a real-life Labour version of CJ Cregg”, the fictional White House chief of staff in The West Wing TV series.
This was small beer for a person who has been accused of everything from plotting to oust Boris Johnson to spying for the British government in Northern Ireland, which she of course denies.
But for me, one of the most remarkable things about Gray is not what she has done but what she has failed to do: go to university.
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I still remember the jolt of hearing a former Whitehall mandarin mention this on the BBC in 2022, when Gray was a second permanent secretary in the influential cabinet office. That made her one of the most senior officials in the office, ranking just below the permanent secretaries who run Whitehall departments.
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For context, the number of permanent secretaries who never went to university around this time was zero, says a 2019 report by the Sutton Trust social mobility charity. Most went to one of just two universities, Oxford or Cambridge, as did most senior judges, cabinet ministers and diplomats.
For context again, the share of the general population going to Oxbridge was less than 1 per cent and just 7 per cent went to the private schools that educated most permanent secretaries, top judges and lords.
Education is not the only measure of class. Parents’ occupations matter too. But Gray is still an outlier in a country where a small elite still has a big say in how things are run. The Labour Party she is trying to get elected has plans to smash a “class ceiling” that by some measures is a bigger problem in the UK than some comparable nations.
But such plans are not new. Calls for a “classless society” were made 30 years ago by then Conservative leader, John Major, the last UK prime minister who didn’t go to university.
What is new is that some employers are finally starting to address the problem. In the process, they are revealing some important things about working life in modern Britain, like the fact that class can have a bigger effect on your chance of being promoted than gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation.
The UK business of professional services firm KPMG revealed this in a groundbreaking analysis of the career paths of 16,500 of its partners and employees it published just over a year ago.
The firm measured class by checking what an employee’s highest earning parent did for a living, a method used by PwC, the Slaughter and May law firm and other groups tackling social class diversity.
KPMG’s data showed people from working-class families took an average 19 per cent longer to shift up a grade, or as much as one year, compared to those from higher socio-economic backgrounds. Progress was even slower for working-class employees who were a) a woman or b) had an ethnic minority background.
Groups such as KPMG are showing that once class backgrounds are known, employers can figure out who is being affected and what can be done to make sure all talented people advance
Interestingly, the class gap reversed in KPMG’s highest reaches, where working-class employees advanced faster. It’s not clear why, says Jenny Baskerville, KPMG UK’s head of inclusion, diversity and equity. But she told me these people might be “so exceptional” that, once they finally reach leadership positions, they “lean into who they are” and make their way to partner level faster.
For all that, there is still a hefty UK class pay gap. One study puts it at £6,291 (€7,335) – or 12 per cent – for working-class professionals. It is nearly three times bigger in the finance sector, which is thought to have the highest class pay gap of any profession.
Regulators have so far shied away from making social class reporting mandatory, fearing the reporting burden in a sector where few firms collect the necessary data. Experts say this needs to change when students from disadvantaged backgrounds with a first-class degree from a top university are still less likely to get an elite job than more privileged students with poor second-class degrees. I agree.
Groups such as KPMG are showing that once class backgrounds are known, employers can figure out who is being affected and what can be done to make sure all talented people advance. That’s not just fair. It is also just good business. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024
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