We are talking to Giles in the gigantic boardroom at Turner Clarke’s (TC) London headquarters. Giles is one of the firm’s most senior Partners. He was privately educated and his parents are both doctors. We are coming to the end of our interview and have reached the section where we ask Giles for his reflections on our findings so far. We explain that a profound class pay gap persists in UK accountancy, we outline the class ceiling at TC, and we then run through the drivers explored so far in this book – informal sponsorship, behavioural norms and exclusive executive cultures. Giles looks distinctly unconvinced. As we finish, he takes a deep breath and pauses, as if debating whether to say what he’s thinking. Eventually he does:

For Giles, the problem with our analysis so far is that it tilts too far towards issues of ‘demand’ rather than ‘supply’. We have thus interrogated various barriers that hold the upwardly mobile back but have neglected how the mobile themselves may be implicated in the class ceiling. What about their actions, decisions, aspirations? In Giles’s experience it is this ‘supply’ issue that is more important. To reach the partnership, he goes on to tell us, people need to “really want it”, need to be “comfortable asserting themselves”, need to handle “robust discussion”. But the upwardly mobile, he argues, “sometimes, not always, but sometimes shy away from that.”

This is not an isolated view. Over the course of this project we spoke to many, particularly those in senior positions (often white men from privileged backgrounds), who shared Giles’s take on the class ceiling. This kind of sentiment is also echoed strongly in the political and policy domain. Here the go-to strategy in tackling social mobility is often to focus on ‘fixing’ the individual, to focus interventions on ‘raising aspirations’ among those from disadvantaged backgrounds, to build their confidence and self-esteem.