Only 5% of UK medical school entrants are working class, data shows
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/27/only-5-of-uk-medical-school-entrants-are-working-class-data-shows
Posted by F0urLeafCl0ver
Only 5% of UK medical school entrants are working class, data shows
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/27/only-5-of-uk-medical-school-entrants-are-working-class-data-shows
Posted by F0urLeafCl0ver
23 Comments
[deleted]
These times should have been about sorting out our own cultures problems with class. It should have been working class peoples turn. But no we put the middle classes of other cultures before them. Thats why we’re stalling as a culture. We didn’t invest in the future.
Ask teachers what they are seeing in the classroom and with the parents if you want to get a good view of all the reasons this is happening.
Personally I think the people becoming doctors should just be the best of the best no matter their skin colour or class
We can fix this if we want. But it means telling currently existing Doctors that their professional qualification won’t mean *as much* when we blow open the gates and started training 3x the amount of doctors we are just now.
Studying just costs so much. With a regular degree you can work while you study, supplement your loan and cover the rent/food, though many will still want parental help. As a medic you have to devote so much time to the course, you just cannot become a doctor in this country without your parents paying for it. I’ve not done the sums, but the medics I know lived with their parents and basically had no life outside of study for 6 years.
This kind of article is at best worthless, and most likely actively harmful—there’s zero context given, so it’s impossible to understand what the story even is, and people are likely to take away the wrong impression from the editorialising. What does “working class” even mean here? How has the size of the “working class” changed over the period? Do we have any indication as to causes? They don’t even link the research they’re talking about, which is a clear sign of mendacity.
– needs difficult qualification
– takes a long time to do
– lots of overtime
And we’re a country that demonises working hard. Are you surprised?
Such a shame. There are so many working class kids who would be fantastic doctors if given the guidance and help to apply. They would understand the needs their community. We need people going into primary schools to persuade these kids that they are able to do this.
I took my daughter to an open day for medicine at Nottingham a few years ago. As we were waiting outside of the lecture theatre the information session for nursing had just finished. Out came mainly white working class type girls and then the medical students went in. Vast majority Asian and quite well to do
White girls with parents.
Hubby is from a white working class background and is a doctor / professor. Says he would never have got into medicine now. Such a shame for the local working class ( of all colours ) who don’t think they stand a chance and aren’t told that they are good enough 😞
It’s a shit job. There are easier ways to make money that don’t involve shift work.
Ultimately it’s turning into a better paid version of working in an art gallery.
The reason why it attracts so many Asians is for the “prestige”.
But ultimately no idea why anyone would want to do it.
Maybe make it worthwhile for them. No? Then expect nothing to change.
Leave it to r/unitedkingdom to take this statistic as “foreigners are taking our med school places!” And not “the public education system needs improvement”
No surprise there. Just be in Jesmond, Newcastle and you won’t hear a single geordie accent, you will just hear southern accents. It’s a real shame as Newcastle is losing it’s identity and the lower class who were already on the backfoot are being pushed out to North Shields. I’m not saying there’s not rich Geordies, I just mean if you take into account the wealth disparity from North to South which came from the money of coal industry in the North being fed into the South to create a service industry there whilst the North was left with nothing.
What is working class now. Used to be if your family worked in factories etc but not many of those jobs now. My family struggled but still would be classed as middle class.
Make each university taken a % of private school kids capped at the national average of kids going to private school. 5.9%. Watch the opportunities change overnight. Watch the whole foundation of our education system change.
> Applicants from independent schools across the UK were 1.5 times more likely to receive an offer from a medical school compared with students from non-selective state schools and, even after adjusting statistically for their exam grades, socio-economic status and other demographic factors, independent school applications were still more likely to receive an offer.
^^ That’s the most damning part.
It’s not due to ability/performance.
Met my missus while she was at med school and I was at the attached uni. This doesn’t even slighty suprise me everyone of them was private school.
Hardly suprising given you need top grades, the confidence/articulateness to pass an interview and medical work experience (all things kids applying from private schools are more likely to have) to get an offer from pretty much any medical school here. Then you have to be prepared to commit to a very demanding five or six year course with virtually no time for a part time job.
Why would working class people even want to be doctors
None of the [NS-SEC classes](https://www.ons.gov.uk/methodology/classificationsandstandards/otherclassifications/thenationalstatisticssocioeconomicclassificationnssecrebasedonsoc2010#classes-and-collapses) are “not working class” though so I’m a bit confused by this article.
> In comparison, 75% of medical school entrants were from a higher socio-economic background. Socio-economic status was calculated by using the five-level National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC) groupings of parental occupation.
The 5 classes are:
1. Higher managerial, administrative and professional occupations
2. Intermediate occupations
3. Small employers and own account workers
4. Lower supervisory and technical occupations
5. Semi-routine and routine occupations
*Never worked and long-term unemployed
all of those *are* working class. They’re all about having paying jobs. I don’t for a second think there’s not likely a problem where richer students are making up a majority of medical students but people with jobs are working class, even if the jobs pay a lot. A bigger issue would be what % of medical students are from the “owning class” who don’t have working families but live off the income of things they own or rent out.
Also, doctors themselves are “working class”. At least in meaninful terms, we don’t really have a middle class any more… and most attempts to claim we do tend to be article trying to pit one bit of the working class against another bit of the working class.
The Working class are too savvy to spend 15 years training in a specialty that doesn’t guarantee a job, has constant and expensive exams, and can move you to a different area of the country at a drop of a hat..
Of course to become a doctor or GP or dentist you need to spend decades studying at expensive schools full time and a working class or hell even middle class family won’t be able to afford it.
So you end up with the NHS and the public complaining about lack of dentists or doctors or whatever but refuse to adapt learning so
:
A) people studying can get paid to learn aka apprenticeships
B) reduce learning requirements for more specialised professions AKA two year courses for one particular type of treatment/field
So no one bothers and those that do go private
It’s only gotten worse on recent years. I was the last student at my medical school to receive the low income family scholarship (which was the only reason I was able to attend at all) and I was the only one in my year to qualify for it. The year before me there had been 3 students.
The problem goes back to secondary education. Under the tories (which research has shown is always a bad party for social mobility *shocker, I know*) the education system was gutted and reorganised so many times that state schools, particularly comprehensives suffered. The academy initiative has been an abject failure, with more students slipping through the cracks as educators chase arbitrary outcomes and mega academics reduce students to numbers.
If you don’t have help at home (ie. Parents who can help with your homework or afford tutoring) you’re screwed. The individual care/attention for students is just not there anymore – especially if you generally do well and can coast along.
Also: comprehensive schools generally don’t teach interveiw skills or study skills. Mine thought I would be asked things like “describe the process of distilling aspirin from willow bark” I kid you not, that was a genuine question I was asked in the mock interveiw….and I went to one of the better comprehensives in the area.