Civil Servants: Social Status

(asked on 25th February 2016) - View Source

Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what progress the Government has made on determining how best to collect and track data on socio-economic background in the Civil Service.


Answered by
Matt Hancock Portrait
Matt Hancock
This question was answered on 4th March 2016

On 2 February we published a report by the Bridge Group on socio-economic diversity in the Civil Service’s flagship graduate recruitment programme, the Fast Stream. This report can be accessed from the link at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/socio-economic-diversity-in-the-fast-stream-the-bridge-report and my accompanying speech at https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/addressing-inequality-in-the-public-sector-and-beyond-matt-hancock-speech"

For the Fast Stream graduate programme and for the Fast Track apprenticeship scheme, we already collect information from candidates about their socio-economic background. We are working to implement the Bridge Group recommendations on the best measures of socio-economic background for these programmes, including collecting home postcode and school attended by applicants, both at age 14. Both of these new data items will be collected for recruitment to Fast Stream and Fast Track for new competitions from 2016.

We will publish our Social Mobility Strategy for the Civil Service in the Spring, in which we will set out our approach to measuring socio-economic diversity in the wider workforce.

Reticulating Splines