Companies should ask employees what type of school they attended and their parents’ occupations in a bid to make workplaces more diverse, the government said.
Employers are being recommended to ask workers four multiple-choice questions on parental qualifications and occupation, type of school attended and eligibility for free school meals.
The guidelines, Measuring Socio-economic Background In Your Workforce: Recommended Measures For Use By Employers, will start to be rolled out in the civil service later this year.
The civil service will also ask a fifth question: “Compared to people in general, would you describe yourself as coming from a lower socio-economic background?”
However, it will not be recommending this to be commonly used as there is less support for it “from other employers and experts”, the guidelines said.
The document, published on the government’s website at the end of May, reads: “The data these measures will enable us to gather will be of crucial importance, helping us to measure the impact of our policies and actions to increase social diversity in the civil service and beyond.”
The Cabinet Office stressed that the guidelines were voluntary for companies to adopt and employees to answer.
A spokeswoman said they would be rolling out the questions across the civil service in October to around 5 per cent of employees.
A Cabinet Office spokeswoman said: “This government is determined to build a society that works for everyone, regardless of who they are and where they come from – and we all need to play our part in doing so.
“The recommended measures will be used by the civil service purely to better understand our workforce and their experiences.
“As with all diversity data, this will be used anonymously and never to form the basis of individual recruitment decisions, which will continue to be based solely on merit. Use of these measures by other employers is entirely voluntary.”
PA
