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Social Mobility

In a world of increasing inequality, helping to improve social mobility is hugely important. We believe that everyone, irrespective of their background, should be able to achieve their full potential. Supporting social mobility is one of our firm’s inclusion priorities and we've been working hard to help those both inside and outside the firm.

In the UK today, the data tells us a that your social background still impacts your opportunities in life: 

1. By the age of three, poorer children are estimated to be, on average, nine months behind children from more wealthy backgrounds.

2. Significant socio-economic background gaps persist in access to professional and managerial roles, with individuals from professional backgrounds benefitting disproportionately from increased opportunities.

3. Just 7% of children in the UK attend independent schools, but 30% of all A* grades at A level are achieved by these children.

4. 32% of MPs, 51% of top medics, 54% of FTSE-100 chief execs, 54% of top journalists and 70% of High Court judges went to an independent school, compared to 7% of the population.

*Source, Sutton Trust Elitist Britain 2025 and Social Mobility Commission State of the Nation 2025.

Why is social mobility important?

The UK has one of the poorest rates of social mobility in the developed world. This means that people born into low-income families, regardless of their talent, or their hard work, do not have the same access to opportunities as those born into more privileged circumstances.

We want to provide the best service to our clients, bringing diversity of thought to provide innovative solutions to our clients’ biggest challenges. We do this by recruiting the best people, from a diverse range of backgrounds and by creating an environment that helps everyone to succeed.

What we are doing to address the challenge

We’re committed to increasing access to our firm and making sure that everyone, including those from lower socio-economic backgrounds, has the support they need to successfully advance their career with us.

For the past ten years, our Aspire Insight Experience programme has provided invaluable insight into life at Deloitte for Year 12 students from lower socio-economic backgrounds, benefiting over 400 students in the last four years alone. A further 150 people have already been offered a place for 2026.

Spring into Deloitte (SID) is our two-day insight scheme for first-year university students exploring careers in professional services. Recognising barriers such as low awareness, limited confidence and lack of support, we have partnered with Bright Network – a platform that supports diverse students to achieve their potential through coaching, upskilling and opportunity access. Together, we have launched Discover Your Deloitte – a targeted programme supporting students from low socio-economic backgrounds with skills and insight into professional careers. The initiative builds confidence and boosts success in SID applications by demystifying our firm and its recruitment process. In 2025, over 500 students took part, 56% of whom declared multiple low social mobility indicators. In addition, 30% of overall SID participants came from low socio-economic backgrounds, double our usual 15%.

In addition, we support a range of charities and social enterprises working with children and young people such as RISE and upReach. We also continue to be a leading signatory to Access Accountancy and the Social Mobility Pledge.

We have also made specific strides with our recruitment and selection practices, including:

  • Being a leading firm in introducing school and university-blind recruitment.
  • Aligning our attraction and outreach activities to engage with a broader range of schools and universities.
  • Ensuring academic requirements and our selection process are truly inclusive and accessible to all, with the focus of assessments being more about candidate ambition and potential.

Social mobility and our people

Over the past few years, we've made meaningful progress in advancing our social mobility agenda. We recognise there is more to do, and we're committed to evolving our focus to ensure social mobility remains a core pillar of our broader inclusion strategy.

A key initiative in this commitment is our Social Mobility Community, which launched in 2025 with an event discussing the power of social connection in shaping careers. This community is open to all colleagues who are passionate about creating a more equitable environment, fostering dialogue, raising awareness and driving positive change around social mobility within our firm.

Following the community's launch, we have made available a range of resources including a specific social mobility e-learning and a series of videos featuring colleagues from lower socio-economic backgrounds in which they talk about their personal journey and experiences. We hope these resources and personal insights will further boost knowledge, helping everyone to foster social mobility inclusion, both as a colleague and as a People Leader.

Fostering inclusion and taking care of each other are core values at Deloitte, and we know that a diverse workforce improves employee experience and brings better results for our clients. To measure our impact, we gather data on our workforce demographics and report on our socio-economic background pay gap, which you can read here.

Our approach to social mobility in society

As part of the '5 Million Futures' social impact programme, Deloitte is dedicated to fostering strong and sustainable school leadership to improve learning outcomes for pupils, partnering with organisations such as Teach First, Governors for Schools, Chapter One Online Reading, The Access Project, and Action Tutoring, while also supporting 35 UK schools with employability and life skills sessions.

We are proud of the work we are doing to support social mobility, and this has been recognised by our ranking in the Social Mobility Employer Index. But we know there is still more to do. That is why we are continuing our commitment to develop our recruitment and outreach activities, whilst also focusing on supporting our employees within the firm to thrive, no matter what their background.

Case studies

We spoke to several Deloitte people who have been willing to share their personal story of social mobility, or their perspectives on the importance of supporting people from low-income backgrounds and creating equality of opportunity.

Hear from:

For Social Mobility Day 2026, under the theme #Storiesmatter, we continued to highlight the powerful personal journeys of our colleagues. Hear from Shoaib, who shares his experience in Manchester with our ASPIRE programme.

For Social Mobility Day 2025, our community members shared advice they would give to their younger selves. Here’s what they would say.