London, November 14:

Young people from ethnic minority families are transcending Britain’s class system and beating

their working class white peers into well-paid jobs, according to a report. New generations of Indian, Chinese, Caribbean and African families are sailing ahead in the employment market, largely thanks to the encouragement of their parents, research funded by the social policy research and development charity, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, has found. People from Indian working class families are the most successful, said Lucinda Platt, from the University of Essex, who tracked the employment of 140,000 people in England and Wales over 30

years from the 1960s.

Using data from the Office for National Statistics, she found that 56 per cent of people from Indian working class families took up professional or managerial roles in adulthood, while only 43 per cent of those from white, non-immigrant families went into such jobs. Among youngsters from Caribbean families, the figure was 45 per cent. Platt suggested it was the tendency of migrant parents to encourage and expect their children to do well at school that lay behind the success of these groups when it came to getting jobs. But not all ethnic minorities were experiencing success in the employment market. People from Pakistani and Bangladeshi communities were underperforming both other migrant groups and their white working peers. Pakistanis stood a particularly poor chance of gaining high-status employment,

the study found.

“The Pakistanis were less likely to end up in professional and managerial families even when taking their backgrounds and their own educational level into account,” the report stated.

Platt said the fact that a disproportionate number of “upwardly mobile” youngsters were the children of immigrants was to be applauded. “But their welcome progress is no cause for complacency, especially when it appears to be so much harder for young people from Pakistani or Bangladeshi families to get ahead,” she added. The study also found that children whose parents were professionals or managers were more likely to get well-paid jobs in adulthood, and less likely to end up on welfare benefits. While there was ‘more room at the

top’ in modern Britain due to a general expansion of professional and managerial roles, social class continued to play a significant role in most people’s chances in the employment

market, she said. Religion is also part of the picture. Platt found that Jews and Hindus had a greater chance of upward mobility than Christians; Muslims and Sikhs had a lower chance of worldly success. The 2001 census showed nearly one in eight pupils came from an ethnic minority background. This figure is expected to rise to around one in five by 2010.