Teacher Simon Wareham didn’t know what to expect when he took a group of year nine students on a day trip to PwC’s offices. “Newcastle is only about half an hour from our school in Sunderland but many of our students don’t venture out of their own city,” says Wareham, the assistant headteacher and careers leader at Southmoor Academy. “We walked through the doors and their jaws just dropped to the floor. A couple of the kids asked: ‘Do people actually work in offices like this?’ They couldn’t believe it.”
The visit is one part of PwC’s New World New Skills schools initiative, which aims to empower young people with opportunities to learn, work and gain employability and digital skills. As well as an office tour and lunch, Southmoor students took part in team building activities, gave presentations, and worked on solutions for the type of problems tackled by PwC’s teams.
“It was a really good day for the students,” says Wareham. “There was definitely an increase in their confidence and their ability to solve problems [back at school] because they could relate what they were doing in the classroom to what they’d experienced in the real world. A lot of them come from backgrounds where typically they’ll go into the same work as their parents. We’re trying to give them the idea that they could go into sectors they haven’t thought about before.”
Social mobility in the UK is lower than in all major European countries, and only 35% of adults believe everyone has a fair chance to go as far as hard work will take them. In areas of low social mobility, up to 33% of the pay gap is driven by family background, regardless of educational achievement. A 2021 PwC survey of people worldwide found that 50% of respondents said they had been held back at work by prejudice and 13% said they had faced discrimination based on their social class.
Five years ago, PwC set out a strategy to be recognised as an inclusive employer –where people from all backgrounds were able to work, develop and succeed. It also aimed to use its resources to enable people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to make the most of their potential, whether at PwC or elsewhere.
In 2021, the New World New Skills schools initiative helped around 17,000 young people develop workplace skills. It engaged with schools that had a higher than average proportion of students in receipt of free school meals and those in social mobility cold spots (where it is hardest to escape deprivation). Research by the charity Education and Employers shows that young people who have four or more encounters with the world of work while at school are 86% more likely to go on to be in education, employment or training post-18, and will go on to earn 18% more (on average) than their peers.
Hollie Crompton, PwC’s social mobility lead, says businesses of all sizes can take action on social mobility. “This isn’t just about corporate social responsibility. We do it because it’s good for the economy, it’s good for society and for our future talent pipeline. We want people from diverse backgrounds to want to come and work with us.”
Crompton herself joined the company via a school leaver initiative in 2004, the equivalent of an apprenticeship scheme. “The fact that I didn’t come through the graduate route has made me passionate about making sure we’ve got different opportunities for different people to join in different ways.”
The social mobility strategy covers four areas – recruitment, development and progression, advocacy, and community engagement (where the New World New Skills schools initiative sits). As well as the in-person office visits, schools can access an online employability toolkit of lesson plans and resources, and a series of on-demand skills sessions. There are also opportunities for a paid week of work experience during the summer holidays, ringfenced for students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds – 225 year 12 students are due to take part this year.
PwC also has an annual volunteering day, One Firm One Day, and this year a number of staff visited schools and ran sessions on financial literacy, data analytics and team building with students. After the Southmoor Academy trip to the Newcastle office, for example, a number of PwC employees took the opportunity to run workshops at the school about financial management, how to read a payslip and what tax means.
Since autumn 2021, when in-person activities restarted after the lockdowns, the firm has hosted office visits from more than 70 schools involving 3,000 students, says Crompton, while a further 3,000 students were reached by One Firm One Day activities.
Wareham opened the doors of Southmoor Academy to local businesses four years ago and now engages with almost 200 on initiatives such as work experience and in-school visits. “We felt that exam results were all very well and good, but we realised that students weren’t prepared for the future,” he says. “Although they could say they got a level nine in English, they couldn’t talk about themselves and their skills. [Businesses and schools] have to work together to ensure that our young people can achieve the most that they can.”
PwC is also working internally to track the impact socioeconomic background has on careers. It significantly increased the data it holds on the backgrounds of its 24,000 UK staff and is in the process of analysing the results. For the past five years, the firm has ranked in the top 10 in the Social Mobility Foundation’s employer index for its work in this area, and in 2021 PwC voluntarily published its socioeconomic background pay gap for the first time.
Crompton advises businesses that are similarly keen to make an impact to “learn from what you’ve done around other areas of diversity. A lot of organisations are much further ahead in their thinking about how they tackle diversity issues such as gender and ethnicity. That can be applied to socioeconomic background.”
For Wareham, he’s just received news that one of his year 13 students has been accepted on to PwC’s apprenticeship programme. “That’s exactly why we’re doing this. It’s about opening doors and broadening students’ horizons, no matter their background. Everyone should have the same opportunities.”
Whether you’re just starting out or have a wealth of experience under your belt, find out more about career opportunities at PwC
