Internships have barely been out of the news over the last six months, and a consensus seems to be emerging that it's wrong for private sector companies to exploit people who have very little choice but to work for free. A dire job market has made it far harder to find paid work than was the case five years ago, and people trying to find their first jobs often find themselves competing against people with several years experience having to take a step down. Undertaking unpaid internships is one of the few ways to build up a CV good enough to compete.

Charities haven't avoided being sucked into the wider debate, there's been a back and forth in The Guardian over whether non-profits should pay interns. Volunteers have long been a part of how charities function, and so things are less clear cut than for the private sector. But what's been astonishing about the debate is just how limited its been. The conversation has centred on whether the intern benefits enough from the internship for it to be unpaid. Charities, and particularly those that have a social focus, need to think about the wider impact of their internship program. At the moment, most interns in charities - like most employees - are white, middle class and graduates (often post-graduates) of research-intensive universities. This is partly a matter of affordability, but it's also a consequence of the fact that many charities, whether they say so or not, want candidates from these universities. Of course, graduates of pre-1994 universities don't hold a monopoly on the research and communications skills that charities demand, but it is the case that the comparatively intensive tuition you get at these universities is the easiest way to develop them.

This wouldn't be a problem if British universities were egalitarian, but they're not. In 2009, only 11.5% of Oxford students came from routine/manual backgrounds, while the comparative figure for London Metropolitan University was 57.2%. And this isn't just an Oxbridge problem: of the ten universities with the worst access figures according to class, eight were Russell group universities and the other two were Bath and Durham. Working class students made up less that twenty per cent of students at all of these universities.

So at the moment, third sector internships entrench privilege and do nothing to promote social mobility. But they don't have to. Most internships last three months and charities justify them by claiming that interns receive valuable training. They could be an excellent way for charities to open up the sector to people from non-traditional backgrounds. For this to work, charities would need to be proactive, targeting a specific group, whether that was school leavers, people from a specific university or from a specific area. They would need to not just encourage applications, but make sure that the internship matched the skills and abilities of the people they were recruiting. This is a discussion that we're beginning to have at the Young Foundation, and its one in which the interns are playing an active part. Some of the changes that have been suggested might not be easy to bring about. Some interns from less privileged backgrounds might need more support and training, and charities that went down this route would certainly have to commit more resources to the internship. But if we want the internship programme to be more than just a way to exploit cheap labour, getting serious about social mobility might be one way to do it.

Written by ex The U intern Thomas Lyttelton.