Tackling class barriers to medical school | Letters

Broad descriptors of class fail to capture the full picture of underrepresentation, writes Dr Katie Petty-Saphon, while Dr Carl Darby says working-class grit is a useful quality in the NHSMedical schools believe that individuals with the potential to make a good doctor should be given the opportunity to do so, regardless of their background. We must seek talent from a wide and diverse pool, and discussions on how to make the profession more accessible are important and welcomed. However, the headline of your recent article, which focused on class rather than socioeconomic status, is misleading (Only 5% of UK medical school entrants are working class, data shows, 27 February).The Sutton Trust study mentioned uses a simplified national statistics socioeconomic classification method to determine an applicant’s class, based on their parents’ occupation. This approach places a social worker and barrister in the same category without any reference to the salary they receive. More context is needed, a fact recognised by Ucas, which stopped collecting household occupation data as an indicator of socioeconomic classification in 2021. Continue reading...