Tackling the under-representation of British Muslims in top professions
To address the barriers identified in the report, the authors recommend:
The government should:
- Ensure integration strategies do not solely focus on values or counter-extremism, but also seek to promote the economic and political benefits that greater participation in Britain’s civic life and labor market can bring to both young Muslims and the broader community
- Continue to support organizations like Future First, UpRising, and the East London Business Alliance, which are already leading important work in helping ethnic minorities to overcome barriers to social mobility
- Explore applying new criteria to public procurement decisions relating to the diversity statistics of service providers, in order to encourage diversity within the private sector
- Legislate to make the anonymization of CVs compulsory in private and public sector recruitment
The Muslim community should:
- Lead the way in shifting attitudes within their community towards the role of women in the home and workplace, to encourage a greater level of economic participation. Younger generations may champion this, but it must also be supported by key institutions, such as mosques and the Muslim Council of Britain.
Schools and local authorities should:
- Ensure that they are offering good information, advice and guidance to make sure that students who aspire to top professions are making the right educational choices.
- These could include conducting parent-focused public information campaigns on the employment and education landscape of the United Kingdom, and recruiting high-flying Muslim professionals to run career education evenings with parents.
- High performing students with poor formal English skills should also receive targeted tutoring, to ensure that a lack of formal English capability is not a barrier to talent.
Universities should:
- Fund a program similar to AimHigher, which will help to boost representation from disadvantaged communities — including British Muslim communities — in Russell Group universities in particular.
Employers should:
- Do more to prevent discrimination and reduce the perception of discrimination — with the government and organizations such as the CBI encouraging them to undertake contextual recruitment as part of their graduate recruitment process.
Commenting on the report, its author Louis Reynolds said:
Our national conversation about integration almost always focus on abstract values and attitudes, and too infrequently considers the practical factors that also play such a strong a role in people’s social and economic advancement. As this report shows, a few achievable changes in education, local authority support, and renewed commitments from Muslim communities and employers, could go a long way towards correcting the underrepresentation of Muslims amongst the U.K.’s top jobs. Improvement in this area will be an important and necessary step forward for Britain, as our society will become stronger and more cohesive as we begin to tap into the economic potential of many more of our talented young people.”
John Hall, chairman of the Aldgate and Allhallows Foundation, said: “The Foundation supports the educational needs of young people in Tower Hamlets and is very pleased to have supported this report. Limitations to progression after study as reported here are as deserving of attention and remedy as the more frequently examined progression to higher education itself.”
— Read more in Rising to the Top (Demos, October 2015)
