Bright children from middle and working class families are missing out on professional jobs because of continuing "elitism", a Government-commissioned report has warned.
The report, by a cross-party panel chaired by former Cabinet minister Alan Milburn, calls for urgent action to break "closed shop mentality" which, it says, still characterises the professions in Britain.
The panel found more than half of all the top professional jobs were still taken by candidates who were independently schooled, even though they accounted for just 7% of all schoolchildren.
Failure to break this pattern will, it says, mean that the opportunity of achieving the most significant wave of social mobility since the Second World War will be lost.
The panel was originally set up by Gordon Brown to examine the barriers to entering the professions.
In more than 80 recommendations, it will argue that enhancing social mobility must be the top social priority for any government, now and in the future.
The report will show that while up to nine out of 10 new jobs in the future will be in the professions, they are currently drawn from a relatively narrow section of society.
It will say that the typical professional of tomorrow will be growing up in a family that is better off than seven out of 10 families in Britain, while occupations such as the law and finance are still dominated by people from independent schools.
Currently 75% of judges and 45% of senior civil servants were independently educated.
Among the measures it recommends for tackling the problem is a new army of young professionals and university students to mentor young people and a national "Yes you can" campaign, headed by inspirational role models, to raise aspirations.
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