Class in Britain has become an increasingly difficult thing to define. But however you chose to characterise the “working class,” there must be room for nuance. This is precisely what the government’s recent decision to limit the civil service summer internship scheme to certain applicants based on the occupation type of their parents at the age of 14, is lacking. It is widening access done wrong.

“Using parental occupation type alone does not capture the diverse ways in which class inequality manifests in contemporary Britain”

I say this as someone who considers themselves working class, and has benefitted extensively from class-based widening access. And, given that just 1 in 10 successful applicants on the fast stream, the civil service’s main graduate scheme, currently come from lower income backgrounds, there is a clear need to diversify its intake.

However, although there is no one way to define class, using parental occupation type alone does not capture the diverse ways in which class inequality manifests in contemporary Britain. One commonly defined aspect of class is “cultural capital,” the idea that your class influences the kind of cultural references and knowledge you have access to. The type of jobs your parents did often shapes the sorts of careers that you perceive as accessible to someone “like you,” as well as your ability to be successful in the application processes for them.

But this does not mean there is no economic dimension to class; household income remains a key determiner of outcomes across your life, not least when it comes to educational and career opportunities. Job title alone does not provide this kind of information. A part time “modern professional” such as a nurse could conceivably be earning less than a full-time “routine worker” like a plumber, for example.

And, informed by the 2011 Great British Class Survey, a team of researchers found that models of class based solely on occupation do not effectively capture most British peoples’ experiences with class-based inequalities. They found that, for instance, class is increasingly tied to home ownership, something that was once possible for working class families and that is becoming the preserve of generationally wealthy parents who can afford to support their first-time buyer children.

In a country where your job title alone does not define your household income, a “widening access” scheme based solely on parental occupation at age 14 will inevitably leave some working class young people out.

“Such a narrow scheme also fails to address why working class young people are less likely to apply to schemes like the fast stream in the first place”

And there are easy ways of improving this. Parental occupation can and should be a facet of the eligibility criteria, but so should household income as assessed by Student Finance, an easy metric to use in a scheme targeted at current students. Other markers that the civil service could adopt include being eligible for Free School Meals, postcode-based deprivation markers like the IMD, or whether you grew up in council or social housing.

Such a narrow scheme also fails to address why working class young people are less likely to apply to schemes like the fast stream in the first place, and why they are not as successful as their middle class peers once they do. It does not reveal what it is about the fast stream’s intensive application process that might not bring out the best in its working class applicants.

The scheme promises to facilitate more representative government policy, but outside the confines of one summer internship, it is not guaranteed to make the civil service as a whole more diverse. The Institute for Government recently found that when the summer internship has been run on various widening-access criteria in the past, such as race and disability, former interns struggled to progress to senior levels.

And when widening access is done too narrowly, it also makes schemes like this an easy target for the “culture-war” obsessed. This is most harmful to the very people this scheme is supposed to be reaching. If successful interns feel that it was their class alone, and not their own merit, that landed them a place on the scheme, it will only serve to exacerbate a perception of workplaces like the civil service as fundamentally middle class institutions.

The updated summer internship scheme is a step in the right direction. But by using a singular metric, the scheme will fail the very same working class people it promises to widen access to.