You give an excellent snapshot of the current "social sclerosis" but are too despairing about remedies (Editorial, 17 August). Certainly life chances are, at root, about money, and the widening gap in income must be reversed. But one place to start is the systematic lack of access to key professions for children from the poorest families.
The reason to celebrate Alan Milburn's appointment as "social mobility tsar" is that his panel on fair access investigated the dark corners that maintain privilege in Britain. Children from poorer homes are excluded from postgraduate training by cost, and from careers in the creative industries by nepotism and unpaid internships.
We at New Deal of the Mind have been campaigning against the creeping culture of free labour since we were established just over a year ago. In practical terms, we are working with creative institutions to find young unemployed people paid work placements. We are already seeing evidence that institutions previously used to recruiting graduates can hugely benefit from widening their approach. This has been made possible by the Future Jobs Fund, which targeted 18- to 24-year-olds on the dole. This scheme was a useful weapon against the social sclerosis that is preventing people from disadvantaged backgrounds reaching their full potential. We hope that Milburn will advise the government on a replacement for this scheme, which will give opportunities to those at risk of being left behind during the economic crisis.
Martin Bright and Barbara Gunnell
• The director of policy at the London Chamber of Commerce, Dr Helen Hill (Letters 13 August) cannot be serious in her suggestion that the taxpayer should further subsidise employers by paying the wages of interns from jobseeker's allowance. Over the past 30 years or so, private sector employers have enjoyed massive profits, as any study of the growing gap between real wages and profits will attest. This has been achieved not simply through cuts in real wages but also by substituting new technology for human beings, offshoring, and minimising tax contributions.
Now that the inevitable unemployment is starting to hit the income and revenue streams of companies, private sector employers' organisations are asking for yet more subsidies by expecting people to work for free. If this suggestion for more handouts from the state had originated from the unemployed, the homeless, or anyone on benefits they would be vilified.
Dave Hansell
Stocksbridge, South Yorkshire
• The lack of university places is gaining enormous publicity (Report, 11 August), but no real attention has been given to the real victims – the dropouts from the system. While it is sad that those who want to go to university may not get places, students with good educational backgrounds have other options – they do not have to live on the dole.
This is not the case for "neets" (not in education, employment or training), who now number nearly a million. They may be able to get temporary work, but this is likely to dry up if the students turned down by universities go into the low-skill sector to bide time while considering their options. Neets do not have any options. They are becoming a permanently unemployable sector of society. While the focus is on university education, the plight of the really disadvantaged at the bottom of the educational heap is being totally neglected.
Trevor Fisher
Editor, Education Politics
• Every youthful middle-class benefit claimant I have known has scoffed at the SWOT analysis and the motivational training which they have to undertake (Nobody is so pilloried as a benefit claimant – I was one, 14 August). Without exception, they have then gone on to use their own possession of such skills to acquire for themselves an advantageous perch on life's career tree.
Meanwhile those working-class kids on the dole with whom I am in contact get knocked back regularly. Time and again they fail to get work because they lack the confident interpersonal skills, easy articulate chat or service motivation required.
William Coupar
Brighton