Social background should be viewed with same scrutiny as gender diversity

We welcome the latest report from the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission. It’s clear that despite an improvement in the last couple of years more needs to be done in terms of access to the professions and recruitment processes. ACCA believes that social background should be viewed with the same scrutiny as gender diversity and we think this recent research only stands as a further reason to appoint a Minister with direct responsibility for social mobility.  

The report highlighted several initiatives which will take a while to bed in such as Access Accountancy which will see a greater effort from firms and ourselves to collect data and offer internships to pupils from a disadvantaged background. We also launch ACCA Advantage this September, our online career fair which is open to anyone and matches students with employers to assist them through their career, but we must work to ensure that social mobility remains in the spotlight. As any savvy business knows it’s essential that you recruit from the largest pool of talent and we continuously work with business to ensure our qualification is relevant to their needs, as well as being attractive to the widest pool of talent  – for instance, you don’t need a degree to become an ACCA and 88% of our members attended a state school.

Opening up access to the profession is important to ACCA. A great example of this is the recent launch of ACCA-X, a global online platform which allows anyone in the world access to ACCA online courses. At the heart of ACCA-X is our desire to provide accessible, affordable and high quality learning that provides ambitious individuals anywhere the opportunity to obtain the skills and qualifications they can use for a rewarding career.

We will continue to work with the Commission and business alike to ensure we are doing all we can to widen access