If you work in a role adjacent to young people’s careers, you often receive requests from organisations wanting you to spread the word about internships, courses or work experience. Many requests are legitimate and I’m happy to help when I can.

Many are not.

Many are trying to get me to promote an unpaid job, dressed up as an “opportunity”. I imagine some such opportunities have been rejected by job sites and or perhaps their unwillingness to pay their workers extend to an unwillingness to pay to advertise their illegal employment practices.

I got one the other day from a “music agency” in South London. Here – with redactions to preserve their blushes and a couple of edits to quote directly from the accompanying poster – it is:

Applicants were invited to send a CV. The signature at the bottom of the email boasted of a “UK Enterprise Award”.

That unpaid “internship” saves the company over £550 per person assuming the 18-20 minimum wage rates – or nearly £750 at the London Living Wage. The intern gets no formal qualification, no expenses, no workers’ rights – not even a pen.

I could ignore it. There’s plenty of this sort of exploitation, especially in the creative industries where young people pretty much accept that they will need to work for nothing doing stuff they already know how to do and will be treated badly in order to ‘get a break’. In fact, being given a potentially illegal and abusive ‘opportunity’ is often regarded as landing an exciting shot.

But how does letting it slide help anyone? This agency probably aren’t evil slave drivers. They probably get loads of people begging for a chance and genuinely think they’re doing some young people a good turn by styling their unpaid labour as an internship.

So I decide to respond. Here’s what I wrote:

The role you’re asking me to promote involves set hours, “taking orders, following instructions” and it has a “job title”. There is also clearly a selective recruitment process. In what ways – other than it is appears to be unpaid – is this different from a short-term job? 

If it is a job as opposed to clear voluntary work experience (where the volunteer can turn up when they want by agreement and refuse tasks they don’t want to do), then you are legally bound by minimum wage legislation. Even if you can legally justify it as an internship, ethical employers always offer payment (albeit minimum wage) for interns. Unpaid internships are exploitative, especially when they offer no permanent job prospects, no expenses and require the worker to provide their own equipment.

Being an agency in the music industry, I appreciate that you are probably inundated with people willing and wanting to work for free and you may genuinely believe you are creating opportunities while getting free unskilled labour. However, the law on minimum wages exists to stop exploitation and to ensure that everyone, regardless of their ability to work for no salary, experiences at least some fairness when trying to get a break into a competitive industry. In a world where who you know counts for so much, there is already little enough fairness for those who don’t have connections, so these legal protections are really important to stop opportunities being something you can, in effect, buy. Working in the music industry, I’m sure you recognise that.  

May I suggest you check with a legal expert whether your “internship opportunity” is legally complaint with labour laws? I fear it isn’t and you may find yourself facing legal penalties or reputational damage in the long run. Instead, you may like to consider:

• Offering a Living Wage salary for the role.

• Establishing an apprenticeship: as a small employer, you will get government support to pay the low wages of apprentices who you can legally instruct, train and expect to “take orders”. You might want to contact a local college and they can probably help you set up an apprenticeship.

• Offering a T level work placement: this is usually 45 days where a young person (usually 16-19) is placed with you by a school or college. Not only does it cost you nothing, you might even get financial support for agreeing to offer a placement. There are a number of relevant T levels (such as marketing). 

These three options are all legal, less complicated that they sound and you’ll have the support of professional educators helping you deliver an apprenticeship or T level placement that works for you and for the learner. In years to come people who have gone through the scheme with you will talk about how you helped make their career, which, I trust, is your intention, rather than either talking about how they learned not to be taken advantage of at work or perpetuating the same unfair practices for future generations.

Good luck.

Within a few minutes, I got a response back from the “founder” himself, defending his intentions and track record, but also offering to engage in a chat about “best practices”. I think that’s an invitation I’ll follow up. There are three possible outcomes:

If his unpaid internship is the opportunity he claims, maybe I cal suggest ways he can promote it so that it doesn’t encourage others to exploit young people.

If it’s not, but his intentions are good, I might be able to help him turn it into a genuinely supportive opportunity.

And if he is a modern-day Bounderby who I’ve just scared into thinking he’s about to get exposed and he’s just trying to fob me off, then maybe his bluff will get called.

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To promote social mobility, we need to measure it. To measure it, we need to define it. We need to identify markers of socio-economic background. To put it crudely, we need to work out what makes someone working, middle or upper class.

Over the years, I’ve been directly or indirectly involved in many attempts to come up with a simple, but accurate way to define socio-economic background (SEB) for a variety of social mobility and inclusion initiatives. 

Most obviously for me, this has been about university access, wider participation and career opportunities. For many years, the Office of Fair Access & Participation (now part of the Office for Students) has used POLAR quintiles as its headline indicator. This is the rate of progression to higher education from within a postcode. Obviously, this doesn’t equate directly to class and, if the mission to eliminate access gaps were ever successful, POLAR would becoming increasingly meaningless as the differences between quintiles tended to zero.

More recently, OfS introduced TUNDRA, another chilly acronym to identify cold spots of progression. UCAS uses its own Indicators of Multiple Deprivation. Of course, ‘progression’, ‘deprivation’ and ‘class’ are very different things and it’s important not to confuse them, even though the barriers to social mobility may intersect across them.

I could go on listing the zoo of other measures out there, adopting different approaches based on occupational prestige, access to resources (like education or housing), absolute and relative poverty measures, subjective social status, and more marketing-style typologies like, for example, Experian’s colourful Mosaic tool.

Simple or accurate

Last week, this issue of defining background came up in relation to a new project I’m involved in to build more equity, diversity and inclusion into engineering. So I went back to the first work I did on it back in 2010 when the coalition government were first trying to build a Social Mobility Toolkit for employers, providing a comparative way of recording SEB so performance and improved could be measured and tracked.

The assembled experts (which generously included me) compared notes, shook heads, and generally agreed that it is genuinely impossible to come up with a means of classifying individuals that is both simple and accurate. 

Even if a simple measure were ever possible, I’m pretty convinced that an accurate one isn’t. And the simpler it is, the less accurate it gets.

People’s complex individual stories will always be diminished by being put in boxes. That said, aggregated data that approximates at scale to patterns and trends is better than the historic, condescending approach of three classifications of class, based on vague notions about jobs, income, region and accent. (Note the image from the iconic Class Sketch which featured in The Frost Report in 1966, which is copyright, but used under Fair Use.)

How to record and tracking social mobility

So, if you’re an employer, say, who is looking to be more intentionally proactive about social mobility, what data should you gather?

I was inspired to write this by the ever-brilliant Laura McInerney’s blog on Substack in which she mentions coming across the attempt by the Solicitors’ Qualifying Exam, which clearly elevates simplicity over sophistication.

The best practice, I think, is the Government Statistical Service’s recommended series of questions which it has devised to try to harmonise standards. The Government also published this useful guidance for employers (in the financial and professional services sectors, but it applies more generally).

In 2022, the Social Mobility Commission in partnership with The Bridge Group also came up with a new toolkit, which is the gold standard for employers wanting to take social mobility seriously. It includes guidance on what data to gather and how. The Sutton Trust has a similar toolkit too.

Who knows best?

All this data is important and clearly defined terminology is critical if you want to build a solid evidence base. However, when it comes to socio-economic background – or class, as some might call it – there is something to be said for abandoning more scientific approaches and embracing self-identification.

If you’re going to ask questions about someone’s background in order to allot them to a class, why not just ask them – as well or instead – to say where they think they should be placed?

What class you are may well be best defined by where you feel your ‘belong’.

For some people that will never change: former politicians, enrobed in ermine in the Lords, often insist they are still working class. Meanwhile, a titled aristocrat, bankrupt and scraping a living, may never lose their sense of self as upper class. 

For other people, class is mutable. Social mobility, of course, suggests that it is something that can move – or, at least, even if ‘class’ is fixed, everything that gives that word any useful meaning can be changed.

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Over the past couple of years, I been doing some consultancy work for IP Inclusive, an initiative to support diversity in the intellectual property (IP) profession. I’ve been impressed by what lovely and dedicated people they are. I’ve also been delighted to be working in collaboration with the knowledgeable and utterly driven Duncan Grant and highly recommended web development team Visix. 

The original job was to create some materials to promote IP careers in schools. I argued that IP Inclusive was a poor brand for this campaign: it looks at the issue from the employers’ perspective, not the students’. I came up with the name ‘Careers in Ideas’ and, once we had produced the resources for schools, the team commissioned us to produce a website for Careers in Ideas.

Our work was instrumental in helping the IP Inclusive team from the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys to win the MemCom Award for Best Equality or Diversity Campaign 2018. 

And now, IP Inclusive has invited us back to revamp their own website which is aimed at campaign supporters and IP professionals, particularly those from communities that are underrepresented in the sector.

The key challenge is a common one for websites: how do we create a site that will need minimum maintenance, but will always look fresh. My design work has focussed on a solution which drives users to the feast of content in interactive ways. The new site won’t be live for a while, but do watch this space to let me know what you think of our solutions.

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