Having remarked last week that gender politics engages the legal profession like no other issue, former cabinet minister Alan Milburn (pictured) popped up on Tuesday (21 July) to prove me wrong with the publication of a report on social mobility and the professions, which concluded that the law, alongside other popular professions, is dogged by a persistent lack of social mobility.

To some this is news. That is strange. Virtually every study of these issues in the UK over the last 20 years – and there have been a lot – have concluded that social mobility is going backwards in the UK after a golden era in the 1960s and 70s. Being born to relative privilege has a massive and unquestioned link to future opportunities that has been proven beyond any point of statistical debate.

Does the legal profession have particular cause for concern? The basic fact remains that law, like medicine, is built on a foundation of structured academic learning, followed by equally structured vocational training. As such, law is not well equipped to overcome the weaknesses of the UK's educational system. Interestingly, Milburn's report also notes that the number of independently-schooled solicitors has fallen since the late 1980s, so on that yardstick there has been some progress. There is also the issue that law has a very structured career track, with clearly defined routes in, making it one of the more transparent of the aspirational careers.

There is an interesting comparison to journalism, which the report notes has moved from being one of the most socially inclusive careers to become considerably more privileged over the last 20 years. The report concludes that journalism is the only career ion which the proportion of staff educated at independent schools has gone up (it was static or had fallen for all other professions, even for judges). There was also the hilarity of seeing one newspaper covering the report refer to journalism as a "former trade", as if it had been transformed through the infusion of the privileged classes into an actual profession; my chosen trade has far more to be ashamed of regarding social mobility than law.

What the legal profession can do boils down to two things. One is try to give kids from less privileged backgrounds an insight into the profession to at least put it on their radar. Allen & Overy has recently made a laudable effort in this regard with its Smart Start scheme, which introduced over 100 sixth-form students to a major law firm. There is some value to that. Growing up in the grimmer parts of the UK, there are a shortage of people to give children a sense of possibility or ambition. Most would never think of a career in law because it's outside their frame of reference.

The other part of the equation – the bigger part probably – would require law firms to adjust their recruitment policies to screen for intellectual aptitude alongside pure academics. Since there's a raging debate about how you achieve that, and it is far more work-intensive than just filling your quota with firsts and 2.1s from the Russell Group, that will take quite a commitment. Some firms, notably Norton Rose, have at least indicated a willingness to explore such a move.

That doesn't change the conclusion that an intensely competitive career such as law which requires excellent academics is never going to be at the sharp end of tackling social inclusion. But such efforts by the legal profession remain laudable and probably more necessary than ever in a country losing the mobility battle.