Addleshaws applicants to be quizzed on social roots
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Addleshaw Goddard has begun collecting information on the social backgrounds of its graduate applicants.
Carolyn Lee
As of last week all prospective trainees, as well as those seeking vacation scheme placements, have to indicate what type of school they spent the majority of their secondary education in, as well as whether they are among the first generation of their immediate family to go to university.
This is expected to be a precursor to collecting similar data on the rest of the workforce.
“We hope that the combination of questions will give us some interesting data,” commented diversity manager Mary Gallagher. “It’s so that we know our make-up - we’re not really making a judgement on it.”
Around 96 per cent of firms monitor the gender balance of their staff and 78 per cent ask their employees their ethnicity. However, despite the law’s reputation for being the domain of a privileged elite, very few firms collect data on social background.
In the past year Herbert Smith has begun asking graduate applicants whether they were educated in the private or state system. Out of 1,000 applicants the majority came from state schools, while 10 per cent declined to respond.
Carolyn Lee, Herbert Smith head of diversity, said she thought it was ”important to understand our people”, but lamented that “it doesn’t strip out grammar schools” from non-selective state schools.
In contrast, Addleshaws is asking applicants from the state sector to specify whether they went to selective schools or not.
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Readers' comments (11)
Tim | 8-Nov-2010 10:07 am
It is a good thing that attention is now being given to this issue.
The results will be very interesting and I would be delighted if all top 20 firms undertook such an exercise and publised the results.
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Anonymous | 8-Nov-2010 11:19 am
A welcome development, but the danger lies in what is done with this data. Once you have the data, inevitably there will be calls to alter the criteria for offering candidates positions.
It is all too easy to make simplistic assumptions about candidates based on answers to such questions. For example, I went to a public school, but could only do so because I had a scholarship and a bursary. There's no way my parents could have paid the fees themselves. Fine to record that I went to a public school, but not to conclude (as some do) that my parents bought me privilege, or that I am part of some old school tie mafia.
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Anonymous | 8-Nov-2010 12:20 pm
Of course it may be that firms want this information, so they can be sure that they are getting people from the right social background.
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Peter | 8-Nov-2010 1:20 pm
Am I the only person to think "What bl***y business is it of yours?"
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Thor | 8-Nov-2010 4:19 pm
Presumably next you'll be asked to confirm household income and what newspaper your parents read.
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Anonymous | 8-Nov-2010 9:28 pm
it strikes me that if they are merely trying to discover something about their 'make-up', then perhaps this is a question that should be asked after a decision is made regarding whether or not to offer the training contract/vacation scheme.
I do not see that the firm should distinguish between students who had their parents pay for them to go to a public school and those who went on scholarship. The point presumably is that those who had access to the public school are more likely to achieve better academic results all else equal. This premise holds regardless of whether or not a person's parents are able to pay the fees.
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HereIAm | 9-Nov-2010 9:59 am
As a female solicitor of African descent who went to a state school in inner London, I find my initial reaction to such initiatives being that of scepticism. I look forward to the day when firms do not require ‘Diversity Managers’ because staff are recruited based on their merits and not their sex, race, social background etc.
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Anonymous | 9-Nov-2010 12:08 pm
'Of course it may be that firms want this information, so they can be sure that they are getting people from the right social background.'
So what is the right answer these days?
'Am I the only person to think "What bl***y business is it of yours?" '
No.
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Anonymous | 9-Nov-2010 1:42 pm
Are you Brits in competition with us Yanks to see who can come up with the silliest "diversity" initiatives?
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Anonymous | 11-Nov-2010 2:49 pm
I think this is terrible and a complete turn in favour of the "social elite". My family is poor, my father is a builder and my mother a house wife. I went to a very rough secondary schooI. Does that make anyone better o worse than me???
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