There are “notable disparities” between social enterprises led by those who are privately educated and those who have lived experience of social issues, according to newly published research.
Researchers from the London School of Economics and Social Enterprise UK found no significant relationship between social enterprises accessing funding or finance and whether or not leadership are privately educated or have lived experience of social issues.
“Indeed, leadership teams with no private education were more likely to have applied for grants and loans, and more likely to have secured external finance overall.”
It found that proportionately few organisations led by state educated people applied for equity finance, whilst none of those that are led by entirely private school educated people applied for blended finance.
Over-representation of elite educated people
Researchers found that perceptions of finance were different between the two organisation types, with those led entirely by privately educated people more likely to agree that there is sufficient suitable finance for their social enterprises.
Meanwhile, those social enterprises led entirely by people with lived experience were far more likely to access grants, and far less likely to access loans or equity than their counterparts with no lived experience in their leadership teams.
This study adds that there is a “disproportionate representation of elite educated individuals in social investment compared with that in the UK population overall”, but not significantly different from those in the investment industry generally.
LinkedIn profiles of individuals working at social investment institutions were used as the main source of information to inform the research.
Findings showed that 19% of employees had studied at an elite university with 12% of those sampled having studied at Oxford or Cambridge, more than ten times that of the UK population.
Elite-educated people represent a higher proportion of employees in social investment organisations than in the population in general, the research found, and a similar proportion to those in the mainstream investment sector.
The study extended existing work on socio-economic diversity to provide an analysis of a publicly available data set of the self-reported educational experience of 1,736 employees at a sample of social investment organisations in 2023.
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