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The commission’s research found a pay divide of nearly £7,000, on average, between people from poorer backgrounds and their privileged peers, with the gap highest in finance, at £13,713. At the BBC, for instance, 45% of the highest-paid stars went to an independent school.
The commission says those from working-class backgrounds “may be less likely to ask for pay rises”, and may lack access to the networks that can help them gain promotion.
So some employers are deploying strategies to improve progression and ensure equal pay. Grant Thornton assigns the 420 trainee recruits that join the accounting firm each year a manager, who provides guidance to help them advance.
“Resources are available, and we need to ensure that everybody uses them, not just those from fee-paying schools who know how to make the system work for them,” says Malcolm Gomersall, diversity and inclusion lead at the firm.
Collecting data to measure the impact of recruitment and retention policy is critical to improving social mobility in companies. KPMG was the first UK employer to publish detailed figures on the socioeconomic background of its staff.
“We don’t stop at whether employees attended a private or state school; we look at whether they received free school meals, where their parents went to university and which professions they worked in,” says Melanie Richards, vice-chair of KPMG UK.
As more employers recognise that building a more meritocratic workplace is not only the right thing to do, but can provide numerous benefits, such as addressing skills shortages, the social mobility gap may continue to close. “There’s no question: having people from a diverse range of backgrounds can produce better business results,” says Richards.
PITTSBURGH (AP) � North Carolina's Ryan Switzer returned two punts for touchdowns, including the go-ahead score with 4:46 remaining as the Tar Heels held off Pittsburgh 34-27 on Saturday.
Switzer returned a punt 65 yards in the second quarter to give North Carolina (5-5, 4-3 ACC) a 21-point lead. He did it again in the fourth quarter, zig zagging 61 yards to help the Tar Heels fend off a Pitt rally for their fourth straight win.
The Panthers (5-5, 2-4) drove to the North Carolina 26 with under 2 minutes remaining but the Tar Heels stuffed Pitt running back James Conner on fourth-and-1 and escaped.
North Carolina quarterback Marquise Williams ran for two touchdowns to overcome a shaky day passing and the Tar Heels sacked Pitt's Tom Savage seven times.
Savage shook off constant pressure and a knee injury to complete 23 of 38 passes for 313 yards and two touchdowns, both of them coming during a frantic second-half surge by the Panthers after they spotted the Tar Heels a 27-3 lead.
A 2-yard plunge by Conner tied the game at 27 with 8:52 left, Pitt's defense held and the Panthers actually had the ball at their own 8 with a chance to move in front. Three plays produced four yards and punter Matt Yoklic lifted a 50-yard kick that Switzer had to drift back and grab at the North Carolina 39.
One block gave the freshman the edge and he cut back across the field � running through a pair of tackles in the process � and sprinted into the end zone for his second score of the day and third in two weeks. Switzer's two touchdowns set a school record for most punt return scores in one game. His three touchdowns are also a school record for most in one season.
The victory continued North Carolina's unlikely rise following a 1-5 start. The Tar Heels came in having won three straight by an average of 21 points and seemed to be well on their way to making it four straight routs when Thomas Moore's second field goal put them up 24 with 12:51 left in the third quarter.
The Panthers were coming off an emotional high after rallying to beat Notre Dame last weekend, a victory that moved Pitt to the cusp of bowl eligibility and served as the most significant triumph of coach Paul Chryst's brief two-year tenure.
Chryst allowed he wasn't sure how his team would respond and was treated to another uneven performance in a season full of them.
The Panthers marched 64 yards on the opening drive for a field goal and was deep in North Carolina territory on its second drive when Savage scrambled to his left and had the ball knocked out of his hand by Martin. Travis Hughes recovered and in an instant Pitt's momentum vanished.
North Carolina ripped off the game's next 27 points. Williams dashed in from 16 yards out � completely freezing Panthers defensive back Anthony Gonzalez � to give the Tar Heels the lead. After a Thomas Moore field goal, Williams ran through a pair of arm tackles during a 10-yard sprint around left end to make it 17-3.
The Panthers had no answer as North Carolina's rejuvenated defense, which was so abysmal earlier in the season and associate head coach Vic Koennig said he was �disenchanted� by his group's play, attacked Savage relentlessly.
During one five-possession span in the second and third quarters, Savage endured six sacks, avoided another by intentionally grounding the ball by switching the ball to his left (non-throwing) hand and injured his left knee at the end of a lengthy scramble.
Still, he hung around and put the Panthers in position for one of the biggest comebacks in the program's lengthy history, a bid that ended when Conner found no space to move on fourth down with 1:10 left.
Insead and Copenhagen Business School have joined forces on a research project which, if successful, could provide a blueprint for saving thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises worldwide.
Researchers will try to canvass up to 6,000 privately owned Danish SMEs and ask detailed questions to build a realistic picture of how prepared the owners are to transfer ownership.
The research is crucial because owner-managed companies account for about 80 per cent of businesses in Denmark and nearly 20 per cent of those owners are aged over 65, according to Morten Bennedsen, chair of family enterprise at Insead. The Danish Industry Foundation, a private philanthropic organisation, estimates that due to the age of the proprietors about 25,000 business will have to be transferred to new ownership in Denmark during the next 10 years.
Prof Bennedsen and his counterpart at CBS, Peter Møllgaard, hope to gather so much data that they will be able to produce a benchmark ranking that will be published online and allow business owners to see how they compare with their peers in terms of preparation for transfer of ownership.
Private owners of SMEs face two choices, Prof Bennedsen and Prof Møllgaard explain: to hand over to a family member or to sell to an outsider. An ownership transfer within the family can lead to loss of value in the hands of a less competent successor. Less well documented is the prospect that the owner cannot find a buyer at the asking price and has to close the shutters at retirement.
“When I talk with dealmakers they say the biggest problem family business owners have is valuation. But the value the owner puts on his company is frequently imaginary,” says Prof Bennedsen. Owners often cannot produce a spreadsheet that will show how the price is derived, he says.
Owners fail to understand that a buyer might need a spreadsheet to raise financing, he adds. They also do not recognise that part of the value of the company will leave when they retire because they are frequently so integral to their business.
Mads Lebech, chief executive of the Danish Industry Foundation, adds that owners also do not appreciate the depreciation in value of their capital expenditure, for example on plant machinery. “A lot of these owners think they should have a higher price, but a lot of these businesses will never be sold, they will just be shut down,” says Mr Lebech.
The Danish Industry Foundation has given a grant of DKr22.8m ($4.2m) to fund the establishment of the Centre for Owner-Managed Businesses at CBS and the five-year research project. The centre will begin operating in May and the first surveys will be done this summer.
Statistics Denmark, a government agency, will collaborate in the research, provide large amounts of its existing data on the companies and conduct the telephone surveys. In addition, the professional services firms PwC and BDO will each survey 250 of their clients and hold consultations with selected companies.
By the end there will be the online benchmark comparison tool, a checklist to help owners to see if they are ready for a transfer, and six academic papers that Insead will produce based on the research findings.
FULLY FURNISHED BATH ATTACHED FAMILY ROOM FOR RENT IN AL NAHYAN FOR THE COUPLES ..
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Fully furnished Room with attached bath available for Indian Bachelor, near Post office round about Sharjah.
All times are GMT 4. The time now is 11:01 am.
Guess Who This Binky Baby Turned Into!
Before this tired tot was singing about being in his feelings, he was just another kid catching some z's in Toronto, Canada. Can you guess who he is?
Judy Greer -- Good Genes or Good Docs?
SYDNEY, Oct 11 (Reuters) - Australia’s two top bankers will be questioned by a parliamentary committee on Thursday over revelations from a public inquiry that found banks repeatedly pursued profits ahead of their customers’ interests.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia Chief Executive Matt Comyn, and Brian Hartzer, who heads Westpac Banking Corp , are each scheduled to face intense questioning from parliamentarians over their banks’ governance failures.
It will be the first time CEOs of Australia’s biggest financial institutions are questioned about the misconduct uncovered by the inquiry, disclosures which shocked the country, drove down share prices, raised the spectre of financial penalties and cost several executives their jobs.
The inquiry known as a Royal Commission could recommend tougher regulation and civil or criminal charges when its final report is handed down early next year, having heard evidence of widespread product miss-selling, charges for services-not-rendered and fees taken out of dead client accounts.
“Our main focus will be on how some of the best-qualified and certainty highest-paid directors and senior management in the largest corporations in Australia allowed their companies to be involved in such scandalous behavior over what has been a decade now,” Matt Thistlethwaite, an opposition Labor lawmaker and the deputy chair of the 10-member committee, told Reuters.
Thistlethwaite said he would take a particular interest in CBA, Australia’s biggest bank and the one which has suffered the biggest reputational damage from the inquiry.
“There are going to be lots of questions that are going to flow to the new CEO of the Commonwealth Bank, about why his particular organisation seems to have been the most scandal-prone over the last decade,” Thistlethwaite said.
The heads of the remaining members of the “Big Four” - Australia and New Zealand Banking Group and National Australia Bank - will also be probed later this month.
Although a traditional ally of Australia’s financial sector, Australia’s governing centre-right coalition government has sought to reassure angry voters that it is committed to tougher banking oversight.
“A large part of what I’m going to be inquiring about is what is their response to the report, and more critically, what they are going to do to address it and respond,” Tim Wilson, the Liberal chair of the committee and coalition MP, told Reuters.
Late last year, the government proposed new laws to increase penalties and lengthen prison terms for financial crimes in a bid to strengthen the regulator’s enforcement powers.
I am an elderly woman who was driving from Florida to Oklahoma with two small poodles and puppy in a loaded Jeep SUV when I picked up a large nail and started losing air fast in a tire. I sped up trying to make it to the next town, which was Alexandria.
I made it. It was close to 9 p.m. and I saw a Subway shop with some workers. I knocked on the locked door and a young woman came out. When I told her my plight, she recommended going to the Walmart auto service and used her phone to show me directions.
I tried to put some air in the tire, but it was losing air faster than I could get any in, so I took off for Walmart. They were closed, so I parked and called my son. He reminded me I have AAA, so I called them. I didn't even know if I had a spare or not, so I started unpacking my Jeep. The nicest young man from Sadler's Towing company arrived around 10 p.m. and showed me I did have a spare and put it on. I'm sorry I didn't get his name. Then he repacked my Jeep for me and told me where the hotels were and where to take my tire the next morning to get it repaired.
I was so rattled by this time that I missed the turns the young man told me, and I pulled into a drug store. Two young women were stocking shelves and they explained what roads I should take to get to the motels. I was very flustered and they helpfully explained it several times.
I got an early start the next morning and found Despino's Tire repair shop to fix my tire. Again, several nice young men unpacked my Jeep, repaired my tire and repacked the Jeep.
I was so impressed with the helpful, polite young people that I met -- four girls and 5 boys (at my age, all young people are girls and boys) -- that I often think about Alexandria with fond memories. What could have been a traumatic experience turned into just an inconvenience.
You should be very proud of your town and the young people who represent it. You sure raise your people to be friendly, polite, helpful adults.
A raft of recent studies about school vouchers couldn't have come at a worse time for our new Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
That's because the studies report devastatingly bad results for students in those voucher programs. And they've been flowing into public forums just as DeVos, a leading advocate of school vouchers, takes charge of federal education policy. DeVos's patron, President Trump, proposed during his campaign to shovel $20 billion to the states to support magnet and charter schools in voucher programs.
Voucher programs give parents public funds to spend on approved private schools for their kids. The idea is to give children in underperforming schools an escape route to a better education, while providing competition that hopefully will goad those poorer schools into improving themselves.
Conservatives like the idea, which dates back to a 1955 essay by Milton Friedman, because it means reducing government's role in education and subjecting schools to market discipline. Give parents a set sum to spend on any school that meets minimum standards, Friedman wrote, and "a wide variety of schools will spring up to meet the demand."
But the economist's nirvana hasn't materialized as expected. Studies of a few early voucher experiments in Milwaukee, New York and Washington, D.C., were equivocal at best, showing some modest improvement in test scores for some students and none for others.
That's why the latest findings, which emerge from studies of statewide programs in Louisiana, Ohio and Indiana, have left education experts stunned. In a nutshell, they find huge declines of academic achievement among students in voucher programs in those three states.
"These results are without precedent in the educational literature," says Kevin Carey, director of the education policy program at the think tank New America. "Among the past results, none were as positive as these are negative."
A study released last February by a team of researchers led by Jonathan Mills of Tulane University found that students in Louisiana's expanded program lost ground in their first two years in the program. Those performing at average levels in math and reading — that is, at about the 50th percentile — fell 24 percentile points in math and eight points in reading after their first year in the program. In the second year, they improved slightly in math, though they still scored well below non-voucher students, and barely improved at all in reading.
Those results resembled December 2015 findings by Christopher Walters of UC Berkeley, Atila Abdulkadiroglu of Duke and Parag Pathak of MIT covering the Louisiana program's first year, which found that participation in the program "substantially reduces academic achievement."
The findings dismayed advocates of "school choice" such as the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an Ohio charter school advocacy group, which acknowledged, "This is all very bad news," though it noted that the 2015 study covered only a single year and therefore "ought to be taken with a grain of salt."
But things didn't look any better in Ohio in July, when the Fordham Institute released its own survey of the voucher program in that state. Voucher students, the study found, "have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools…. Such impacts also appear to persist over time, suggesting that the results are not driven simply by the setbacks that typically accompany any change of school."
The third data point comes from Indiana, where a voucher program was sedulously promoted by former Gov. Mike Pence, now the vice president. There, two researchers from Notre Dame have found that "voucher students who transfer to private schools experience significant losses in mathematics achievement" and no improvement in English compared to their records at their former public schools. A student who entered the Indiana program at the 50th percentile in math fell to the 44% percentile a year later, according to the study, which is still in progress.
Educational experts are at a bit of a loss to explain the declines. One possibility is that state authorities don't do a good enough job of vetting the private schools that are accepting the vouchers. The Louisiana and Indiana programs were criticized for accepting religious schools that were financially strapped, including some that placed creationism on their curricula. Walters and his colleagues found that private schools joining the Louisiana program had experienced "rapid enrollment declines relative to other nearby private schools before entering the program," which implied that the voucher program was attracting "a negatively-selected set of private schools struggling to maintain enrollment."
Walters told me the important takeaway from his study is that "school choice is not guaranteed to improve student outcomes." Voucher programs are predicated on the idea that parents have an unerring feel for what's best for their kids. "One common argument is that parents are able to make better choices for their children," Walters says, "but that doesn't always happen."
New America's Carey says the statewide studies carry a warning for DeVos not merely because they undermine the case for choice-driven academic improvement.
"In DeVos's advocacy, she seems to favor the least restrictive and most market-oriented policies" about which schools can participate in voucher programs. "In her rhetoric, it's the creation of market mechanisms that are the important thing to promote. This research does not support that view. In fact, it may support the idea that that approach is harmful to student learning."
John Travolta and Kelly Preston Call Their Pregnancy a "Miracle"
John Travolta and Kelly Preston are calling their new pregnancy a "miracle."
In an interview with People Magazine, the couple said: "We tried for several years, and we didn't think it was going to happen for us."
According to People, the couple's daughter, Ella Bleu, 10, "reacted with joy" at the news of the pregnancy. The couple lost their son Jett who sufferred a seizure while vacationing in the Bahamas. He was 16 years old. Sources close to the family have said that "they can never replace him" and that they "always wanted to have more kids."
They are genuinely appreciative for all the support and well-wishes they've been revceiving from fans about the new family addition. "We are so moved by the generous outpouring of support and goodwill we've received from all over the world," the pair said.
Refugees in Dimitrovgrad, a city in eastern Serbia near border with Bulgaria, September 2015.
Serbian police said they have detained six people for smuggling 78 migrants trying to reach the European Union on July 19.
Police said they discovered the migrants in two separate incidents near the Bulgarian border -- 37 migrants from Afghanistan and Pakistan were hidden in a van intercepted on a regional road, while another 41 people from Syria were caught crossing illegally from Bulgaria.
The arrests came as Bulgaria announced it had detained 45 migrants who were trying to cross into Serbia, including 30 Afghans, 13 Pakistanis, and two Iranians.
Serbia has been stepping up efforts to stop the migrant influx, including forming joint police and army teams that will patrol the borders with Bulgaria and Macedonia. The country wants to avoid a migrant pileup after EU member Hungary recently introduced tough antimigrant measures.
The Serbian army commander, General Ljubisa Dikovic, and senior police official Vladimir Rebic jointly toured the border area with Bulgaria on July 19, the Defense Ministry said.
It said joint forces are "currently being formed" but didn't specify when they will take up positions. An army general will be in charge.
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Beyonce has surprised her fans by releasing a soundtrack to her Netflix documentary "Homecoming."
It is available through most major streaming service, including Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal.
Beyonce first surprised fans when she unexpectedly dropped her fifth studio album, "Beyonce," in 2013.
SACRAMENTO, Calif., March 21, 2019 /PRNewswire/ — Burns & McDonnell, a 100 percent employee-owned engineering, architecture and construction firm, was awarded a multimillion-dollar, five-year Indefinite Delivery Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract to provide multidiscipline design, architecture and engineering services for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ (USACE) South Pacific Division.
The scope of the program includes the full spectrum of design disciplines on Military Design and Interagency and International Services (IIS) projects in California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Utah. Work will include engineering studies, design and construction management services for new and existing structures like training, warehouse and storage facilities, as well as aircraft hangars, microgrids, marine terminals and renewable energy projects. USACE selected four firms to compete on multiple task orders for up to $44 million in design services.
The USACE‘s South Pacific Division has four operating districts — Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco and Albuquerque — providing federal military engineering support to secure the nation, promote economic growth and reduce risk from disaster.
Burns & McDonnell has been involved in military projects since 1941. Since then, the firm’s experience has expanded to include diverse projects and services for federal and military clients worldwide, including in Brea, Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, California. Since 2012, Burns & McDonnell has successfully completed more than 300 task orders under 39 IDIQ contracts for the USACE.
Burns & McDonnell is a family of companies made up of 7,000 engineers, architects, construction professionals, scientists, consultants and entrepreneurs with offices across the country and throughout the world. We strive to create amazing success for our clients and amazing careers for our employee-owners. Burns & McDonnell is 100 percent employee-owned and is proud to be on Fortune‘s 2019 list of 100 Best Companies to Work For. For more information, visit burnsmcd.com.
LONDON - Major cryptocurrencies remained under pressure Tuesday morning as the market continued to digest Monday's news that several financial regulators were cracking down on a fundraising method that uses them.
The initial fall of both bitcoin and ethereum on Monday was triggered by a crackdown on so-called initial coin offerings in Asia. ICOs are where startups raise money by issuing new digital currencies or tokens that can be traded online.
China announced a ban on ICOs on Monday, declaring them illegal, and South Korea pledged to "strengthen levels of punishment" for those looking to raise money through ICOs. The two countries followed the US, which ruled in July that ICOs must adhere to strict securities laws.
Those falls continued into Tuesday, with both ethereum and bitcoin losing about 2.5% more overnight. Ethereum had lost as much as 20% during trade on Monday, having been worst hit by the ICO crackdown.
The Ethereum blockchain is the most popular platform to use when hosting an ICO - it allows people to write "smart contracts" that will release new tokens to investors when a certain amount of ether, the digital currency that powers Ethereum, is received.
Further falls could be on their way, with a China-focused executive from the trading platform eToro describing the ICO crackdown as a "huge deal."

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