Covid batters life chances of disadvantaged young people, says PwC. Business could do more to help

Research findings should exhort the government to make good on its ‘levelling up’ pledge, which has so far been more of an exercise in gesture politics than a properly worked out programme, writes James Moore

Covid has further hindered young people from disadvantaged groups, whose struggles often start at school (PA)

Covid-19 has mostly battered older people’s health, and younger people’s life chances.

The pain, however, has not been equally shared. As ever, those who are already poor and disadvantaged have been left to grapple with the worst of it.

This was laid bare in a recent piece of research conducted by PwC, the professional services firm.

Amid all the talk of “levelling up”, its latest social mobility study, conducted among 4,000 Britons, found people from disadvantaged backgrounds “failing to meet their professional aspirations” which have been further set back by the pandemic.

Perhaps most damningly, a quarter of people who had received free school meals (as I once did in the days when you were humiliatingly singled out at school for doing so) did not think education had helped them.

Whilst many aspired to work in professional jobs while growing up, those aspirations were not met.

“Work and study hard and you’ll get on” is a message that is continually repeatedly in one form or another. But in the British workplace another cliche is more truthful: it’s not what you know, it’s who you know.

Just look at Boris Johnson and his cabinet.

PwC’s chief people officer – I’m beginning to warm to titles like that as an improvement over the chilly “head of resources” – Laura Hinton is a still rare senior businesswoman who has lived in social housing and had plenty of free school lunches herself.

Troublingly, she says, the firm has found that the rise of tech-based working forced by Covid restrictions is acting as an additional impediment to those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

It isn’t just a lack of connectivity they experience – although that in itself is a problem, which Hinton says PwC has sought to address through issuing laptops and the like to those on its (paid) internships. It’s that video conferencing prevents people in this category from speaking up. They are less likely to push themselves forward, clearly a problem in competitive business environments, and remote working is exacerbating that.

The pandemic-driven rise in home working is, I think, a positive in many ways, particularly when it comes to those of us with disabilities. It’s also more flexible, which can be very helpful for those with family commitments.

But here is a potential drawback, and those employers who are committed to improving their record in the field of social mobility (as more should be) need to consider it.

Hinton’s firm is pushing forward with a hybrid model, involving some home and some office-based work. However, those who wish to spend more time in the office will be able to do so if they think that helps them.

Other remedies are the sort of thing you constantly see people banging on about – firms need to invest more in skills and ongoing training, offer better work experience (and paid work experience like PwC’s programme), and use more evolved hiring practices, including weighting UCAS scores for social background (or just straight up doing away with them).

Blind application forms and smarter job interviews, which can also discriminate against those from disadvantaged backgrounds given the issues with confidence, are other potential avenues to explore.

And they need to be explored.

Alan Milburn, the former Labour cabinet minister who serves as an advisor to PwC, says that the issue is too big and too complex for Whitehall to address on its own, and he may well be right about that.

The research suggests that a large majority of the public, too, believe that businesses should do more, particularly in the wake of Covid, and that companies have a responsibility to contribute to the efforts that need to be made to reduce the scarring, economic and otherwise, caused by the pandemic.

As things stand, I fear there is entirely too much talk and hand-wringing on this subject from those with the capacity to address the situation.

But at the same time, a government drawn from the ranks of the elite should have its feet held firmly to the fire when it comes to delivering on “levelling up”, which to date has been far more of an exercise in gesture politics than a properly worked out policy programme.