From bin man to CEO and Professor of Social Mobility – what Lee Elliot Major’s journey has taught him about how to help working class kids thrive 

Lee Elliot Major is Britain’s first ever Professor of Social Mobility. Thinking about social class and how it holds people back, particularly here in the UK, is his life’s work, and a subject close to his own heart. He grew up in Feltham, “a rough part of West London best known for its young offenders’ institution” and was living on his own by the age of 16, having left school with precious few qualifications after his parents split up. “I was what I would now refer to as a NEET – Not in Education, Employment, or Training – I’d stopped going to school. No-one in my family had ever been to university. My future looked pretty bleak. I got a job, through family, as a bin man. Then my best mate persuaded me to go back to school and his family took me in. A teacher told me to apply to university, so I did. Then I did my doctorate… Social Mobility is always a group effort!”  

Major’s own experiences gave him a passion to help others. After university he went to work for the philanthropist Sir Peter Lampl at The Sutton Trust (an organisation which helps kids from poor backgrounds to get into the top universities and carries out research into the most effective ways to boost social mobility). “I became CEO at the Sutton Trust and wanted to use my knowledge to level the playing field for kids from my kind of background.” 

These days he argues that as we are all products of many different things, we need a more sophisticated model within companies to create cultures of true belonging. “The key question to ask is what are the barriers to your performance?” In schools, he says, pupils are seen as individuals with their own particular needs and issues. “Organisations in my experience tend not to do that. Human Resources departments need to ask themselves: what does this person bring to the table? We are in an era of declining opportunity, there is less room at the top now than there were in, say, the decades immediately after the war. Privilege tends to become entrenched. Companies need to be part of the solution, not the problem.” 

Major points to the education arms-race, where middle-class parents get tutors, help their children — do anything they can to give them a good start in life. “This is natural, but it makes it even harder for kids who don’t get that kind of attention to compete, and we are seeing disadvantage becoming entrenched earlier and earlier.” One solution to this, he says, “is for schools to have a contract with parents of what they expect them to do for their children: read to your kids, get them to school on time, oversee homework.” He points out that 20% of young people in the UK and US leave school without a pass in maths and English at GCSE (in Scandinavia only 5% of children leave with such lowly qualifications, which damage future life chances).  

He points to the current incomes squeeze: “The cost-of-living crisis is pushing us back to Dickensian times, there are increasing numbers of young people without a roof over their head, or who can’t pay for food. Attendance at school among those on free school meals is at 40% - those children are missing 10% of lessons, which creates a cycle of deprivation.” 

Against this backdrop he is convinced that companies can play a key role. “Social class has to become a core part of the diversity agenda. It is currently the missing piece. It matters that people in our key organisations understand what it is like to come from the other side of the tracks, the reality of many peoples’ lives. Then they can become more inclusive in their hiring processes. Parental income is no indicator of ability; only 7% of children go to private school in the UK, but at the top of business often more than half of board members are privately educated, and in some professions that can rise to over 70 per cent.” 

So, what can companies do? “Well, first they can become aware of the problem. But ultimately, they need to give people like these jobs, understand the barriers they may face — for instance just physically in terms of being able to get to a job interview, geographical exclusion is huge; if you live in North Devon or Sunderland (areas of high free school meal incidence) it is very expensive to actually get anywhere, which is a huge barrier.” 

He says that as well as looking at the official definition of occupational class — which asks what a person’s mother and father did at 14 — companies should be asking WHERE applicants live, whether they were on free school meals, or in care, or if they come from a particularly deprived part of the UK. 

He points to a KPMG study which looks at how many people there are on the boards of Britain’s top companies who came from working class backgrounds. Currently that is “very low, around 10% and mostly it is not even measured. We need people at the top who understand people at the bottom and what it takes to navigate the system.” 

Recently Major has been working with the Civil Service’s Fast Stream, giving them guidance for working class applicants, creating a pragmatic tool kit to help them navigate the unwritten rules and cultural references of the institutions. He’d like to see companies have explicit targets around social class by 2030, for them to commit to having 25% of senior managers from working class backgrounds (KPMG are aiming for 29% by 2030, from a current position of 13%) and to start collecting background data on all new applicants (currently 92% of job applicants to the FTSE 350 are not even asked the question). 

“I’d like to see a social mobility champion in a senior position in every business, and a mentoring scheme to help kids like me navigate the system,” he says.