Blake Morgan signs Social Mobility Pledge

Blake Morgan have signed the Social Mobility Pledge, joining 500 other organisations aiming to give everyone, regardless of background, the same level of opportunity.

The Social Mobility Pledge encourages organisations to be a force for good by putting social mobility at the heart of their purpose.

The campaign is led by Justine Greening and seeks to bring together businesses and universities to achieve three key objectives – outreach, access and recruitment.

Outreach is working with schools and colleges to provide coaching through quality careers advice, enrichment experience and mentoring to people from disadvantaged backgrounds or circumstances. This fits well with the work the firm is already doing through its apprenticeship programme and connection to the work of The Sutton Trust.

Providing structured work experience and apprenticeship opportunities to people from disadvantaged backgrounds or circumstances. Blake Morgan offers a number of work experience schemes already including PRIME, Pathways to Law and their own Growing Ambitions programme.

Adopting open employee recruitment practices which promote a level playing field for people from disadvantaged backgrounds or circumstances. This could include a ‘name blind’ approach to considering applications, which involves replacing names with numbers (something Blake Morgan already does as part of the graduate recruitment process) or adopting contextual recruitment practices such as how to consider the league table performance of academic institution attended, location of home by reference to socio-economic mapping or an individual’s academic performance relative to the average at their place of study.

Bradley Albuery, the partner lead for social mobility in Blake Morgan, says: “I am delighted that we have signed the Social Mobility Pledge. It is further evidence of our commitment to reach out and make a legal career more accessible to those whose backgrounds and circumstances may make this difficult. There is concern that the opportunity gap is growing and the need for policies and actions that promote social mobility is even more acute.”

Find out more about the Social Mobility Pledge here.