Ethnic disparities and inequalities in the UK
Executive summary
- Careers advice and guidance: publishing a strategy and imposing requirements does little to solve the problem if schools do not or cannot implement the requirements. Whether through a lack of awareness, a lack of funding or lack of expertise, or a combination of any of these, a not insignificant number of schools are not meeting any of the Gatsby benchmarks and many more are only meeting some of them.
- Approximately two thirds of AAT’s students are aged under 25, which suggests a reasonable degree of success in attracting young people to access the education and training it offers. With specific reference to ethnicity, in January 2020, AAT published research commissioned from Opinium which stated 24% of the population believe ethnicity is a barrier to entering the accountancy profession. This is substantially lower than perceptions for investment banking (33%) and law (32%) and marginally lower than perceptions about becoming a business analyst (26%) but still higher than for careers in education, HR and IT (all 21%) so there is clearly much more to be done to reduce, and ultimately eliminate such perceptions.
- AAT firmly believes the government should introduce compulsory ethnicity pay gap reporting as soon as possible. Such requirements should apply to all companies employing more than 50 employees, not 250 as is often suggested.
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