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https://smcpcommission.blog.gov.uk/2014/04/04/the-professions-and-social-mobility-time-to-step-up/

The professions and social mobility: time to step up

Posted by: , Posted on: - Categories: Accountancy, professions, Social Mobility, Uncategorized

This week over 20 institutions from the accountancy profession launched Access Accountancy, a collaborative initiative to widen access to the profession. A key plank of Access Accountancy is the provision of work experience placements for children who lack connections. This is welcome. Accountancy is an area that has led other professions in areas such as school leaver programmes and funded degrees, but had a blind spot when it came to work experience with a plethora of friends, family and client schemes and little else.

Work experience matters because, although it is short and unpaid, it gives people a real insight into a profession, the chance to make contacts who can help guide your choices and advise you on your future job applications, and something that stands out to employers who are looking for evidence you have the competencies they require.

Access Accountancy features a number of the practical measures we recommended in our Business Manifesto, published in October. In addition to the 3750 placements the scheme aims to provide within its first 5 years, the signatories have committed to evaluating the programme (all too rare in such activity), delivering common messages to schools about accountancy and, perhaps more significantly, collecting and monitoring data on the socio-economic background of applicants to the profession. We know that recording such data has been very important to tackling a lack of diversity in other areas such as gender and race; without such data you can’t know if you have a problem or where it might be and for a profession so interested in what numbers tell us it should be natural for it to collect some here.

The initiative is an important demonstration that firms who spend most of their time competing with one another are able to collaborate to make meaningful change. It does however raise two important sets of questions.

The first is around how much the collaboration can achieve. The Commission is clear that initiatives such as this are an important first step, but that care must be taken to ensure they achieve their aims. If all the placements provided go to Tower Hamlets, already deluged by city firms when the rest of the country has so little, it will have failed.

Similarly, those talented young people who are inspired by their placements should be given a proper pathway by which they can join the profession and not have an enjoyable week that raises their hopes only to leave them with no further contact for the rest of their education.

Can the collaboration tackle the thorny issue of selection? More and more firms privately confess that the academic grades they require for entry are proving a very poor predictor of whether someone will be a good accountant; they also know that certain groups seem to disproportionately fall down at certain stages of the process like the e-tray exercises. Alongside this, firms in other sectors which use name and university blind application forms are finding it makes a real impact in who is shortlisted and who is offered a job. Will the profession take steps in these areas?

The second set of questions can be summarised very simply: now that initiatives have been launched in areas such as law and accountancy and areas like medicine are planning their own such scheme, what are the other professions that also lack socio-economic diversity going to do, and when?

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