An increasing lack of social mobility and segregation in schooling has been blamed for limiting career opportunities and the creation of “boardroom bubbles”.British author Duncan Exley explores the impact of social mobility on major corporations and found it narrowed their ability to source the best talent.
Diversity and the elimination of bias and discrimination in the workplace helps improve financial performance through innovation, creativity and empathy. A new equity, diversity and inclusion strategy aims to remove barriers in recruitment, she says. It would make managers accountable for supporting all employees to excel and encourage the hiring of staff that were more representative of their population.
An example of innovative solutions found during this time included a group of factory staff quickly transforming the production of deodorant to hand sanitiser. He says OECD data has shown that children of blue-collar workers who attended schools in which they mixed with the children of white-collar workers were twice as likely to get a university degree or enter a professional management occupation as similar children who did not have the opportunity to mix.
Victoria University education research chair Professor Stephen Lamb has studied the effects of segregation in schooling on education outcomes. “More and more the classes that are being taught in ordinary non-selective schools have fewer and fewer talented students in them and it is becoming harder and harder to pull them up,” Professor Vickers says.