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Hello and welcome to the programme.

We're going to talk about the class struggle today.

Not in a Karl Marx capitalism versus workers' class struggle kind of way.

The struggle we're focusing on is that facing those from less privileged backgrounds

in getting into top professional jobs.

For many companies, the words diversity and inclusion, or D&I, have become a kind of guiding star.

Big corporates all on message. When they recruit staff, they at least say they're aiming for diversity

among their team,

and they're striving to offer an inclusive workplace. But that is usually framed as all about

race or gender or sexuality or disability. Class, though, is perhaps less often talked about.

Why is that? I'm joined by three guests who have thought hard about this. And we'll start with Professor Lee Elliott Major from the University of Exeter and some facts, because Lee, you've done some research into class diversity in the Footsie 100. And what have you found?

Yes, this is something that I've been very interested in.

How can we look at social class diversity as well as diversity in terms of ethnicity and gender?

And we did a survey of Futsi 100 companies.

And we just asked some very simple questions.

Was social class mentioned in the

diversity inclusion strategy? Was data collected on socio-economic background of employees?

We found that there was only 12 out of the 100 Futsi companies that could make any sort of claim

to have sort of social class within its diversity efforts.

47% of those companies made no mention of social class whatsoever. Lee, thanks for that. Next up,

we have Sandra Wallace, who is the current chair of the Government's Social Ability Commission,

...