Socio-economic background - Scottish Government

Data on employees’ socio-economic background is limited, as it only gathered as part of our recruitment system and the People Survey, neither of which link to employee records. We use the National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) as our measure for socio-economic background below. The NS-SEC groups the occupation of the respondent’s main income-earning parent when the respondent was 14.

We use the three-class definition of the NS-SEC below. Those whose parents were in “professional or managerial occupations” are classified as “High”. Those whose parents were in “clerical, sales, service and intermediate technical occupations” are classified as “Intermediate”. Those whose parents were in “routine, semi-routine, low supervisory and technical occupations” are classified as ‘Routine’, and a final category is included for those whose parents “Never worked”.

The declaration rate for socio-economic background in our recruitment systems and in the People Survey are 97.9% and 81.6% respectively. The latter rate excludes all staff who could not be categorised for any reason (denoted “Undetermined” in the charts and tables below).