The broken society - Telegraph It is hardly news that Britain has a social mobility problem, but it is always worth being reminded of just how serious that problem is. According to Alan Milburn, the Government's independent adviser on social mobility, a host of professions - medicine, the law, politics, the media - are increasingly dominated by the wealthy, who have marched their way through the private school system, via Oxbridge, to seize the commanding heights of British society. For Mr Milburn, the chosen solution is similar to that proposed by Professor Les Ebdon, the universities access tsar, in higher education: to prise open these bastions of elitism, by force if necessary. At its baldest, this approach would mean reserving places for particular groups, or fining those whose intakes fail to reflect society as a whole. Given that Mr Milburn is one of the few Labour politicians to have shown any understanding of aspiration, this is profoundly depressing, in that it puts the cart firmly before the horse. The prophets of social mobility seem to be convinced that the closed shops they decry are closed by design. Little could be further from the truth. The professions and the universities have searched high and low for decent candidates from non-traditional backgrounds, but have found them frustratingly hard to come by, thanks in large part to the decline of the grammar schools and similar engines of social mobility. This is precisely the point made by a new EU-funded report. With blue-collar jobs in terminal decline, and white-collar proliferating, Britain's education system is churning out pupils without the basic skills to cope. Mr Milburn's report amounts to dozens of pages, but he puts his finger on the problem in a single sentence: "There are still too few good schools." Fix that, and all else follows.