Read: Survey on employer attitudes to tracking socio-economic diversity

What gets measured gets done. So if we want opportunities to be open irrespective of background, then tracking socio-economic diversity of employees matters for all employers. The challenge is that we have huge amounts of data on outcomes in education, not least tracking the progress of pupils on Free School Meals, but when it comes to employment, it’s a black box. 

So we have teamed up with a Purpose Coalition university, the University of West London and their Centre for Inequality and Levelling Up to carry out a short but groundbreaking new survey on social mobility tracking attitudes of employers. 

Whether your organisation tracks socio-economic diversity already and thinks it’s vital or isn’t sure how to, or thinks it’s unnecessary, tell us what you’re doing and what your views are through completing our short 10 minute survey. The new survey will ask employers whether they are tracking employee social mobility data, what their plans are to do so and what the barriers and challenges they see to putting in place effective tracking, for example not knowing the right questions, poor understanding of the issues or concerns over staff response rates.

The employer socio-economic tracking survey runs until 30th September and we’ll then be able to share the results with all those taking part later in the year.

If you’re interested in finding out more about how to track socio-economic diversity, get involved with our Equality of Opportunity Coalition which brings together lots of employers looking at socio-economic measurement and wanting to find out how they might= start introducing it to their organisation - getting involved is a great way for organisations to share their experiences and also to learn about best practice on how other employers are already going about it.

The survey is anonymous but it will help us all to know where we need to focus on to drive more awareness and understanding, plus what support employers would need if ultimately this becomes a more mandatory approach from a future Government.

We know the right questions for employers to track the socio-economic diversity of their employees, because they can use standard questions developed by the UK Government Cabinet Office in 2017 and updated by the Social Mobility Commission in 2021.

The survey should only take around 10 minutes to complete and runs until 30th September:  https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/Y3RQVS9 

Justine Greening, Chair of the Purpose Coalition and former Secretary of State for Education