To encourage poorer and ethnic minority youngsters to consider a career in the civil service, the government has introduced new internships. Tim Fish reports on efforts to ensure Whitehall’s high-flyers are less uniformly white.
In the UK, more than in most developed democracies, the accident of birth dictates the chances people have in life. As Nick Clegg said last year at the launch of the coalition’s Social Mobility Strategy, patterns of inequality are “imprinted from one generation to the next”.
The strategy represents a bid to weaken this cycle of inequality; and among its elements is a commitment for the civil service to increase the number of internship it offers to people from poorer, ethnically diverse backgrounds.
The civil service already runs a graduate level ‘Summer Diversity Internship Programme’ (SDIP), but until recently there have been no official arrangements for younger students. The only way schoolchildren could secure internships in Whitehall was by directly geting in touch with team managers – something that favoured those with good contacts. But the civil service now runs a two-week internship for 16-17 year olds, and a one-day introductory scheme for secondary school pupils aged 13-14. These were piloted in 2011, and completed their first year of operation earlier this year. CSW set out to examine how these schemes work.
School’s out for summer
The new programmes have two main drivers, according to Ray Dempsey, the cross civil service diversity and equality leader based at the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP). First, they are about helping children “who weren’t getting opportunities because they did not know somebody”; second, they’re a chance to “showcase the civil service” to the younger generation.
The scheme for 16-17 year olds places 60 students in jobs across all the main government departments. They came from 46 different schools, with 42 per cent from black, minority or ethnic (BME) groups and 72 per cent female. The departments provide the DWP diversity and equality team with details of the job roles, a single point of contact, and a line manager to maintain communication.
The students are selected by the Social Mobility Foundation (SMF – see box), and each is then allocated a placement by the DWP team. To qualify for selection students must have at least five ‘A’ grades at GCSE and at least ‘ABB’ predicted grades for A-Level. In addition they need to be eligible for free school meals, or be the children of non-graduates.
David Johnston, chief executive of the SMF, tells CSW: “As far as I know, the government has never done anything to open up Whitehall to this age group – and we’re pleased it has, because sixth formers are in key transitional times. [The scheme] has a big impact on their thinking about what universities they want to go to.”
According to Dempsey, the main challenge facing the DWP team is to “make sure that the students have a meaningful experience”. And as they’ll all talk to each other about their experiences, he has to ensure they all get a “similar wow factor”.
The scheme will expand to 100 places in 2013 and 150 in 2014, and will be extended beyond London to the regions. A pilot will be held in one region (yet to be decided) next year. Following this year’s programme, 52 students responded to a post-event evaluation questionnaire. All said they would not have secured an internship without the programme, and 81 per cent said they would consider a career in the civil service – an increase from 73 per cent in the 2011 pilot.
London calling
Meanwhile, the one-day programme for 13-14 year olds saw 110 students from 12 schools come to London to participate in events that included talks from ministers, ‘speed-dating’ with a series of civil servants who talked about their work, and a research project at the Civil Service Live exhibition (which is run by CSW publisher Dods). The day finished with a careers workshop offering advice on topics such as building up a CV and how to improve skills for a job in the civil service.
According to Dempsey, the feedback from schools was that participating students “have really got down to work” in their studies and that the DWP team had “got the message across” to them to start thinking about their careers and to study hard if they want a decent job.
Summer in the city
Meanwhile, the flagship SDIP scheme focuses on black, minority and ethnic (BME) groups and young people from lower socio-economic backgrounds, offering an experience of Whitehall to groups who rarely apply for the civil service Fast Stream programme. In 2012, the scheme offered 116 paid internship placements for six to nine weeks across 20 different government departments.
The SDIP is advertised through the Fast Stream website and on social networking sites. It also targets careers events and careers advisers at post-1992 universities, and other universities with a high BME student base. Applicants are placed in departments by the government Civil Service Resourcing Unit, which manages staff provision for the whole civil service including the Fast Stream programme.
“The departments have to give [the interns] a flavour of what it would be like to be a fast streamer, so they are given jobs with real responsibility very quickly and often are solely responsible for delivering a project within the six- to nine-week period,” says Gillian Smith, deputy director of the SDIP at Civil Service Resourcing.
She adds: “Most interns are trying to get at least one day shadowing a ministerial private office, which is an eye-opener for many of them. It helps them to understand how government works on a broader scale and gives them opportunities for connections and networking with people right across the department.”
The interns work on live projects and engage in research for papers which make recommendations to ministers, says Smith, and may attend ministerial meetings. And departments are not shy about throwing their interns in at the deep end: she remembers meeting an intern who told her that during the second week of his placement he was the UK representative at a meeting because somebody had to withdraw: “He had a briefing beforehand and developed some arguments by researching the subject in week one, and in week two he was thrown into an international meeting pretty much unsupported, and I understand he did very well.”
Lifting them higher
“What we are hoping to achieve is for a high number of people that experienced internships to apply and then be successful for the Fast Stream, and we supplement this with a coaching programme,” Smith says.
This coaching programme is provided by Civil Service Resourcing in partnership with RareRecruitment, an agency that specialises in BME graduate recruitment. It began in 2008-9 with just nine places, and helps those who participated in the SDIP and have applied for the Fast Stream by providing advice to boost their selection skills and self-belief. Smith says funding has been provided to extend the coaching programme in 2012-13 to 50 places, up from 25 places in 2011-12. However, she claims the funding amount cannot be disclosed due to “commercial confidentiality”.
In an anonymous survey of interns collected by Fast Stream in 2012, 91 per cent of students from the 2012 intake went on to apply for the Fast Stream, up from 85.5 per cent in 2011. However, figures for the number of successful applications are not available.
Over time, the new youth programmes and the SDIP aim to provide bright young people from poorer backgrounds with a better chance at securing a job in the civil service, and to improve its diversity from the bottom up. However, as Dempsey suggests, departments have a job on their hands to ensure that all those involved have a potentially life-changing experience. And in the end, all this work will only be worthwhile if the civil service can soon provide figures showing that significant numbers of former interns are securing jobs in the civil service.