More needs to be done to widen the social background of the civil service, a panel of senior officials has warned.

Speaking at the Civil Service Live conference being held in central London this week, senior civil servants called for recruitment policies to change and for the culture of the civil service to welcome all, not just the traditional elite.

Bill Jeffrey, the civil service's diversity champion and permanent secretary of the Ministry of Defence (MOD), described the session as a "risky" one to hold. The question and answer session had been organised, he explained, because the civil service's equality and diversity policies have to date focused on gender, ethnicity and disability, avoiding "the question of social disadvantage".

The civil service is widely seen as the home of the 'traditional elite': privately-educated Oxbridge graduates, who are more often than not white and male. Jeffrey said the old school tie still "probably matters far more than it should, but less than it did". Another panel member, Sue Owen, a director general from the Department of Work and Pensions who has worked in the foreign office, the Treasury, and the Department for International Development in the past, argued that this varies from department to department.
 
"At the top of the Treasury and the top of the foreign office there is more of that [old school tie ethos] than at the DWP," she claimed. "That is partly because these [DWP's] sort of services recognise the importance of delivery, financial and corporate skills, as well as policy skills" and therefore took candidates from outside the traditional pool of people, she argued. "It is the ability to run things like Jobcentres that is important."

It is important for the civil service to move away from this mono-culture, said Treasury solicitor and head of the government legal profession Paul Jenkins, because "if we're going to provide a public service, we can provide it better if we can understand and represent who we are serving. I want the civil service to look like the Number 36 bus."

Education

Addressing how best to increase the diversity of social backgrounds within the civil service - and especially the senior civil service - children, schools and families permanent secretary David Bell said action is required as early as possible in the education process. "The real test is to make social background irrelevent when it comes to university choice," he said. "We have all got a responsibility and that responsibility begins at school."

School pupils also need to be encouraged to aspire to roles they may not have considered, said Jenkins. He and Baroness Amos of Scotland, the first black woman to sit in the cabinet, regularly visit state schools to encourage children to consider the law as a career, for example. It is important, Jenkins said, "to get them while they're young".

Jeffrey admitted that the civil service "could do more" work in schools. "This is something that tends to be dealt with at the department level", he explained. Departments and public bodies represented across the country - such as DWP, HM Revenue & Customs and the armed forces - usually have more of a local presence and might be in closer contact with local schools and colleges.

If civil servants did go into schools, The Apprentice TV series winner Tim Campbell said, they might be able dispel the image most people have of the civil service as a "stale organisation", or of the public sector as something you join "if you can't get on in the private sector".

Class is very difficult to measure, the panel agreed - and this is not just about schooling, Jeffrey said: it is also about whether a child's family has high expectations of them - university, a successful career - and pushes them to succeed. "We have got to make ourselves open to those whose families don't have those expectations," Jeffrey said.

Bell said there were already moves being made to get applications from a more diverse range of social backgrounds: the civil service might be presented as an option by careers advisers; there are public sector apprenticeships and a new diploma in public service; fast stream recruiters are focusing on a "much more diverse range of universities" than previously. Already, 70 per cent of the most recent fast stream intake is from non-Oxbridge universities, Bell pointed out.

Recruitment

Campbell suggested that job advertisements should not be placed just in the usual places: he would never expect to see a civil service job advert in the News of the World, for example, but it would reach a wider audience. Equally, vocational qualifications can be just as important as academic qualifications: "We need to have more than just one narrow criteria to assess whether people can do the job."

Owen said the same rule could be applied to fast stream recruitment: she wants to see fewer graduates fresh from university in the fast stream, and more existing civil servants with a few years experience under their belt. Interview panels for any job should include a junior member of staff in order to get some diversity of opinion in the selection, she added.

Getting in the right fresh faces is all to the good, warned Jeffrey, but it will make little long-term impact if people are put off by the atmosphere they found - and he claimed that government departments can still appear "impenetrable" to those who have not come from the traditional, private school, Oxbridge background.

The civil service "should aim to be effortlessly exclusive", suggested Jeffrey. "The real question is what happens when people are in [the civil service]. Do they feel that this is an organisation that they are part of and can contribute to? I don't think we have quite got there yet."