Don't help your child to get a job, says new social mobility tzar James Caan

Parents should not help their sons and daughters into jobs and should only use their influence if a child has failed to find work after a year, the Government’s new social mobility tsar has said.

Too many parents are eager to provide their children with the opportunity of work experience at top companies, said James Caan, the entrepreneur and Dragons’ Den panellist who will be introduced in his new role on Tuesday.
Instead, he said, children should be encouraged to make their own way and parents should step in only if their offspring were seriously struggling. Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister, who appointed Mr Caan, will unveil an initiative this week aimed at persuading companies to take on more people from poorer backgrounds.
Mr Clegg has been an outspoken critic of unpaid internships, which he has said limit social mobility, despite his father having helped to arrange work experience at a bank for him when he was a pupil at Westminster School.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Caan said it was important for parents to “let the child stand on his own two feet”. He added that parents should not become involved for about a year and only when “the child has tried everything” and failed to find a job. Holding back ultimately helped the child, he said. “You are trying to develop your child too; you don’t want them to feel as though they don’t have to make the effort.”
He accepted that it was not the job of the Government to tell parents how to bring up their children.



But he said: “Our job as a society is to make people aware of the consequences of some of the things that we do and the underlying messages that sometimes we send out by some of the actions that we take,” he added.
Mr Caan was born in Pakistan and founded two recruitment companies before moving into private equity. He was a panellist on the BBC programme for three years.
He said that, not having been to public school, he had to work harder to prove himself and “make myself more visible to those employers, those opportunities. The onus is on me because I don’t have rich parents”.
He added: “People from deprived backgrounds can be massively impactful on business – they have more to prove, they are more driven, more determined. In my own experience it was not easy, you always have to do that bit extra to stand out. You are hiring somebody to whom that opportunity is more valuable.”
Last month, Westminster School was criticised for selling off placements at companies for hundreds of pound each.
Asked about such auctions, Mr Caan said that parents were “reinforcing” the problem by bidding for expensive internships at City firms, adding that it was a sign of the “desperation” many felt about their children’s prospects.
Parents were wrong to think “it is only for little Jonny, it doesn’t really matter”, Mr Caan said. “What we are saying is that actually it does matter; look at the macro effect of what we as a country are trying to do.” He quoted figures which he claimed showed that while only 7 per cent of the workforce went to public school, more than half of doctors and those in many other professions were educated privately.

Companies have to do more to attract people from poorer backgrounds, he claimed.
He said he wanted to make firms “more aware of their obligations and social responsibilities” and to help end situations where a good job depended on “people you know, or … the school that you went to or how you got in”.
He wants to encourage companies to develop explicit policies on work experience placements.
He said it was important that they paid young people carrying out work experience because it created “good discipline” on both sides. He added: “We are trying to create some awareness to make people understand the implications of some of their actions and the decisions they make.”
He forced family and friends to apply formally through his company’s human resources department if they wanted work experience, he said.
“We treat them the same as anyone. You can write in to us, send in your CV and we would have a look at it, to evaluate if there is any space over the period.”
Mr Caan is helping the Deputy Prime Minister launch an “Open Doors” campaign on Tuesday . It is intended to persuade firms to run open and fair recruitment and help to “raise the aspirations of young people”.
Officials said that Mr Clegg wanted to stress that the campaign was not just good corporate social responsibility but was also a “moral thing to do”.
One said: “Opening up recruitment to search for the very best talent makes good business sense. If companies and businesses keep recruiting from the same small talent pool then they will find it harder to innovate and grow and ultimately to succeed.”
Mr Clegg said: “I’m thrilled that James Caan is joining our campaign to make sure every young person has a fair chance to get the job that makes the best of their skills and talents.
“This is about putting an end to outdated and lazy recruitment where only young people with the right connections get a foot in the door.
“Wasting young talent is a tragedy that has huge economic implications for the country and I want to see more companies work towards making their recruitment process fairer.”
Gus Baker, a co-founder of Intern Aware, which campaigns against unpaid internships, said: “At a time when family budgets are tight, parents simply cannot afford to fund their children on unpaid internships in London, where most placements are based.
“The cost of working for free in the capital is £1,000 a month, meaning a three month internship costs around £3,000. That’s money that most people simply don’t have.”