Overarching project context and objectives: The Department for Opportunities, the advocacy and campaigning arm of the Social Mobility Foundation. Our vision is for the UK to be a country where every person, regardless of background, can access opportunities, which allow them to get on in life. Our mission is to identify the opportunities that increase social mobility and the barriers that stand in people’s way, while working with the organisations and people best placed to deliver change. We do this by:

Practical interventions: We intervene where we see there is a challenge that can be fixed.

Behaviour change: we run campaigns that draw on the insights of our employer index and our young people to drive change.

Influencing campaigns: we use research to identify areas of public policy which need to be addressed to improve social mobility and argue for change.

Activating DO’s supporters to drive change in their spheres of influence and to co-create solutions or ideas

Research objectives: We want to produce a piece of research that highlights a lack of representation of people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds in senior positions, to promote the need for more action on social mobility. Specifically, we want to examine the socioeconomic background and of public appointees from 2020 and CEO’s of publically owned companies in the UK. The proxy measure we can use for this is what school they went to and whether it was i) state school ii) grammar school iii) private day school iiii) public boarding school.

We also want to assess whether CEOs predominantly grew up in the South East, so are interested in their secondary school location.