Academics are good at diagnosing problems. Where we tend to be less effective is when it comes to converting our critical insights into concrete, realisable policy recommendations. This is partly about the questions we tend to ask. For example, the drivers of the class ceiling, as we have shown, are in large part societal. They are about fundamental inequalities in the resources (economic, cultural and social) that flow from a person’s family background. And there are no simple, silver-bullet policy tools to address this kind of systemic inequity. But it is also an issue of expertise. Sociologists like us are not normally trained to think about policy solutions. But there are many people who are. A good example is Nik Miller, Chief Executive of The Bridge Group, a charity that researches and promotes socio-economic diversity in the higher education and employment. Since its inception in 2008, The Bridge Group has established itself as the UK’s leading policy voice on social mobility. This reputation has been forged, in large part, by providing a unique offering, producing critical, independent research, but doing so alongside employers, and then crafting insights into practical recommendations that organisations can actually implement. In the remainder of this Epilogue we team up with Nik to think about how we might begin to tackle the class ceiling. Together, we have come up with 10 practical steps to support meaningful change.

Before we outline our recommendations, it is worth briefly reflecting on the contemporary policy terrain surrounding social mobility and elite occupations. As we outlined in the Introduction to this book, political concern about the exclusivity of the UK’s most prestigious professions is longstanding. Yet this has largely not transferred onto the organisational agendas of employers. Certainly, action to promote social mobility lags many years behind allied interventions on gender and ethnicity (as well as disability and sexual orientation). There are three key reasons for this: first, there has not been a robust evidence base on social mobility into elite occupations for organisations to draw on; second, there have been longstanding concerns among firms about how to effectively measure class background – or what most employers call ‘socio-economic background’; and third, there is no legal imperative compelling organisations to act – class background is not a protected characteristic in the UK.

But things are changing.