“You need to understand that you’ll be competing against people who have been conditioned their entire lives to believe the Bar belongs to them.”

These words, said to me by a mentor while I was applying for pupillage, have stayed with me since because they identified something that the language of merit tends to obscure.

By Aleister Adamson, Barrister, 25 Bedford Row

They were not saying that other candidates were more intelligent or industrious. They were describing the advantage of having been raised to expect admission and the reality that some people arrive at the Bar having rehearsed for it all their lives. They know how its institutions speak, what its selectors value and how confidence is supposed to look. Others arrive having first had to imagine that such a life exists, and then that it is possible for them to live it.

That difference is not incidental. It shapes who applies, how candidates are perceived and, long after the successful ones have entered the profession, whether they feel entitled to stay.

The current figures make the imbalance difficult to dismiss. In the Bar Standards Board’s latest data, 19.3% of all barristers were recorded as having attended an independent school, compared with about 6.5% of schoolchildren in England. Because more than a third of the profession did not answer the question, the BSB also calculated the proportion among respondents. At KC level, the recorded figure was 28.7% even before non-responses were excluded.

The distortion is visible before practice begins. The Bar Council’s analysis of Pupillage Gateway recruitment for 2022–23 found that 69.4% of recorded offers went to applicants whose parents had professional occupations. Only 10.4% went to candidates from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Nearly four-fifths of offers went to people who had not been eligible for free school meals.

Of course, those figures do not prove that selectors consciously prefer the privileged. I would suggest they reveal something more difficult. Academic achievement, confidence, work experience and “fit” are themselves shaped by unequal conditions long before an application reaches a chambers committee. The BSB’s own research has found socio-economic status to be strongly associated with success in obtaining pupillage, even when considering factors including prior academic attainment.

Growing up without a map

My own route to the Bar has taken me across class boundaries and rocky psychological terrain. I grew up in a town still living with the aftermath of deindustrialisation. In Corby, “the Bar” was somewhere your uncle disappeared to on a Friday night (although, in truth, Corby had pubs, not bars). It was not a visible profession or a plausible childhood ambition. You cannot aim at a destination that does not appear on your map.

Corby had been built around steel. When the works closed, it lost not only jobs but the structure around which working life and civic identity had been organised. The subsequent reclamation became the subject of the Corby Group Litigation. In 2009, the High Court found that the council had been negligent in its management of the contaminated sites causing a statistically significant cluster of birth defects during the relevant period. The story was later dramatised in Netflix’s Toxic Town.

Britain still tends to picture working-class life through an industrial lens. We imagine factories, trade unions and stable manual employment. Those lives were difficult, but they often came with a recognisable place in the economy and a collective identity.

My childhood home was less than a mile from the former steelworks. That history is not a decorative origin story. It is an example of what deprivation looks like when industry disappears and public institutions fail to manage what remains. Modern deprivation shows up in insecure work, shrinking public services, overcrowded housing and schools expected to compensate for every other institutional failure.

The reality of growing up in ’90s Corby was bleak. There was no train or bus station, no cinema, no youth clubs, and very few opportunities. Much of my childhood was spent tearing around the estate on a bike. Happy as it was, the reality is that the world I inhabited was very contained indeed. Meanwhile, a more affluent contemporary can accumulate private tuition, international travel, extracurricular activities and work experience arranged through family contacts.

One child grows up learning to navigate scarcity. The other grows up assembling a curriculum vitae. By the time both candidates sit across from a pupillage panel, their achievements are often considered as though they arose under comparable conditions.

The hidden curriculum

During my law degree, I became conscious that some students had entered the room already fluent in its social language. They knew which experiences mattered, which institutions carried prestige and how to approach people who might later help them. Others were still trying to understand the social grammar.

This is sometimes described as “cultural capital”, but that phrase can make the advantage sound more abstract than it is. In practice, it means knowing that mini-pupillages exist, understanding when to apply and having somebody who can explain what to wear. It means being able to take unpaid opportunities without skipping rent. It means having a parent who reads an application or a family friend who can introduce you to a barrister. It means knowing that a formal dinner is not a test of your moral worth.

Most importantly, it means encountering elite environments without using half your concentration to conceal that they are unfamiliar. This is where confidence becomes misleading. A candidate who has spent years around senior professionals may appear more natural in an interview than one entering that world for the first time. The former may indeed be exceptional. But their composure is not proof of superior potential. Sometimes it is the product of repeated exposure.

The profession understands rehearsal when it comes to advocacy. Nobody would expect a pupil to conduct a murder trial confidently without training. Yet in recruitment, familiarity with elite professional culture can be mistaken for an innate personal quality.

The result is a hidden curriculum. Candidates must learn how to discuss their achievements without sounding arrogant, show ambition without appearing desperate and network without appearing to want anything. None of these rules is impossible to learn. The inequality lies in the fact that some people are taught them implicitly from childhood while others must decode them under observation.

Class is especially difficult for institutions to address because it rarely announces itself neatly on a monitoring form. It is inferred from a school, postcode and read into clothes, posture, vocabulary or ease.

Many first-generation professionals become skilled code-switchers before learning the term. Accents soften. Anecdotes are internally screened before being shared. Vocabulary changes according to the room. Some parts of a background are converted into acceptable stories about “resilience”, other parts remain unspoken because they might create embarrassment rather than admiration.

This editing can be useful. More often, it is totally exhausting. The psychological cost does not come simply from entering an unfamiliar culture. It comes from having to monitor which version of yourself that culture will tolerate.

Social mobility is usually told as a story of ascent. A person works hard, escapes disadvantage and arrives among the successful. The emotional reality is much less orderly than the short-form success stories we see on the news or read about in LinkedIn posts that are always far too long. Upward mobility often feels like moving between languages without becoming wholly native in either.

Success may create distance from the people and places that formed you. Your work becomes difficult to explain. Your speech changes. Your assumptions change. You gain financial or professional security but may feel guilty that others did not. At the same time, you remain conscious that colleagues entered the same room without crossing the same distance.

This can produce a unique form of isolation. You are treated as evidence that the system works while privately remembering how easily it might not have done.

The language of “impostor syndrome” is not always enough to capture this feeling. It can turn a rational response to an unequal environment into a defect in the individual. Some people feel like outsiders because they underestimate their abilities. Others feel like outsiders because they are surrounded by evidence that people from their background are outliers.

This distinction matters because the usual response to impostor feelings is to encourage the individual to become more confident. Of course, confidence can help, but it does not alter the conditions producing the doubt. The goal should not be to train disadvantaged entrants until they become indistinguishable from those the institution has always rewarded. That requires personal erasure.

The cost of having no cushion

At the self-employed Bar, professional anxiety easily becomes financial anxiety.

A missed return, a delayed payment or a quiet month have a different meaning when there is no family money behind you. The same is true of the years before practice. Scholarships are vital, but they do not always cover the accumulated cost of training, travel, professional clothes, unpaid experience and repeated applications. Nor do they remove the opportunity cost of pursuing a profession with no guaranteed entry.

I, and so many others like me, had completed a decade in employment before getting to the Bar. I now work alongside many whose first job is as a barrister.

A person with financial support can experience failure as a setback. For somebody without it, failure may threaten housing, debt repayments or the ability to continue at all. That pressure does not vanish on obtaining pupillage. A first-generation barrister may still lack the informal advice available to colleagues with professional families. They may be less able to absorb late payment, purchase equipment or decline poorly paid work. They may also feel obliged to appear grateful for every opportunity, making it harder to raise concerns or establish boundaries.

This is one reason wellbeing cannot be separated from background. The Bar is rightly beginning to discuss workload, vicarious trauma and professional isolation. It speaks less often about the strain of practising without a safety net or the fear that one mistake will vindicate everybody who regarded your ambition as unrealistic.

Beyond access

There are real grounds for optimism. The profession has changed. Outreach programmes, scholarships, contextual recruitment and paid work-experience schemes have enabled people to enter who might previously have been excluded. The latest BSB figures also show that pupils are less likely to have attended independent schools than the profession as a whole, although the high level of missing data means that conclusion must be treated cautiously.

But access initiatives cannot carry the entire burden. The next stage requires the profession to examine the characteristics it rewards. Is “polish” being used as a proxy for preparedness, or for social familiarity? Does “fit” mean collegiality, or resemblance to existing members? Are selectors identifying potential, or rewarding applicants who have already had the greatest opportunity to display it?

The same scrutiny should continue after recruitment. Mentoring is helpful, but sponsorship is often decisive. A mentor gives advice. A sponsor uses their standing to create an opportunity, recommends somebody for work and speaks for them in rooms they have not yet entered. Research across financial and professional services has found that employees from working-class backgrounds are less likely to benefit from senior sponsorship than colleagues from professional families.

That is how privilege reproduces itself without any meeting at which exclusion is consciously agreed. Work goes to the person already known. Confidence grows through opportunity. Opportunity produces evidence of competence. Competence attracts more work. The cycle can be interrupted, but only if those with power recognise their role in it.

This does not require abandoning standards. It requires distinguishing standards from conventions and talent from familiarity. It means giving useful feedback rather than assuming unsuccessful applicants will somehow acquire the missing knowledge. It means paying people for work, making opportunities visible and explaining customs that serve no useful purpose when left mysterious.

It also means accepting that inclusion may change the culture of the institution. A profession cannot recruit people from different backgrounds and then regard every difference they bring as something to be corrected.

More than representation

The case for social mobility is sometimes reduced to fairness for aspiring barristers but it is broader than that.

Advocacy requires an understanding of people whose lives may bear little resemblance to the lives of those representing, prosecuting or judging them. In criminal practice especially, the profession encounters poverty, drug use, care experience, unstable housing, mental-health difficulties and state failure every day. Social background does not determine whether a barrister can understand those experiences, but a profession drawn from a narrow social range risks mistaking its own assumptions for common sense.

For somebody from a deprived background, there can be something quietly radical about standing in a courtroom that once seemed inaccessible. At its best, the Bar offers intellectual freedom, public purpose and the privilege of helping people when the consequences could scarcely be greater. That is precisely why belonging matters.

The profession should not be satisfied that exceptional individuals can overcome its barriers. Exceptional perseverance is not evidence that a barrier is justified. Nor should stories of hardship be celebrated without asking why so much hardship was required in the first place.

The question is no longer simply whether people from deprived backgrounds can reach the Bar. Some of us plainly do. The more revealing question is, what happens when we arrive? Are we permitted to become barristers without first becoming convincing imitations of those who were always expected to be here?

Talent may arrive with a regional accent, a state-school education and no idea what “black tie” means at an Inn of Court dinner. It may be less polished because nobody has polished it yet. It may hesitate, not through lack of ability, but because it understands the stakes. A genuinely meritocratic profession would know how to recognise that talent before inherited ease disguises itself as merit.

Perhaps the real measure of social mobility is not whether people can enter the profession, but whether they eventually stop feeling like they have borrowed somebody else’s place within it. The future strength of the Bar depends not only on who is allowed through the door. It depends on who can stay without being expected to lock out essential parts of themselves.