SHOCKING new figures showing the scale of inequality in Britain's top jobs have been laid bare in a report put together by a Bolton entrepreneur.

Saeed Atcha, founder of Xplode magazine, has recently taken on the role of social mobility commissioner within the government and helped to create the Elitist Britain report, released yesterday.

The document lays out problems with educational inequality across the country, with the seven percent of the population who are privately educated taking up nearly 40 percent of top jobs in politics, media, sport and business.

Mr Atcha, who was handed an MBE last year at just 22 years old, told BBC Breakfast that the report's conclusions made "shocking reading".

He said: "I didn't realise that so much of the power in Britain rests right at the top, which is worrying for people like me because I haven't been to a private school - why are my odds against the others and why are my chances not the same as others?

In some positions, such as senior judges, the report revealed that more than half of professionals had passed through a "pipeline" taking them from fee-paying schools through to Oxford and Cambridge and then into jobs.

The data, which was put together by educational charity The Sutton Trust, looked at the educational backgrounds of more than 5,000 of the country's leading people in 37 categories across nine broad areas

It also found that women are under-represented in all of the areas surveyed and for those who do make it to the top, their education journeys look different to men.

Women were less likely to have attended Oxbridge than their male counterparts, including the judiciary, where they are 25 percentage points less likely, and the House of Lords, where they are 21 percentage points less likely.

At the time of the analysis in spring 2019, almost two fifths (39 percent) of the Cabinet was privately educated.

Following the results, Mr Atcha presented a series of recommendations by the Social Mobility Commission to get more state-educated people into elite jobs.

"Universities should make use of more contextualised offers," he said. "We're not asking that people should stop going to them or that we should get rid of them but we should get more disadvantaged young people into these top universities so they have got increased chances."

The commission also recommended an end to unpaid internships which take over four weeks and more tracking of socio-economic factors by employers.

You can find a copy of the Elitist Britain report here.