Graduates from poorer backgrounds looking to enter the professions have been boosted by government plans to force employers to fund internships.Unleashing Aspiration concludes that without action to address Britain's 'closed shop' mentality to the professions, tomorrow’s generation of talented young people will miss out on a new wave of social mobility.It reveals more than half of professional occupations such as law and finance are currently dominated by people from independent schools, attended by just seven percent of the population. The report recommends fair rules should be introduced for internships through a nationally agreed Internships Code and a kite-mark will identify high-quality internships.Support will be made available for internships through means-tested micro-loans and private finance to encourage payment for interns and all professions must review their fair access.Graduates wanting to become journalists are expected to be among those most likely to benefit.In a letter to the Guardian, the National Union of Journalists general secretary Jeremy Dear said too many employers were using internships as a way of getting work done for free.He said: "While on-the-job work experience is an essential part of media training, bogus work experience placements are increasingly being used to fill long-term staffing gaps with free labour."Just when we should be nurturing and supporting the people coming into the industry, media employers are exploiting dreams and excluding new talent. By ordering proper enforcement of the minimum wage in the media, it could help make our industry a far fairer place."The recommendations should also help graduates avoid feeling the need to work from free following a poll of 1,500 students by the National Council for Work Experience (NCWE) revealing two-thirds felt they were undervalued or exploited by employers in the current economic climate.Heather Collier, the director of the NCWE said: "These are difficult to times for everyone but it's not a green light for businesses to act unethically, If there is any doubt in an employer's mind regarding potential exploitation, it's simple – pay them!"Unleashing Aspirations Panel Chair, Alan Milburn MP, said: "It's not that many young people do not have aspirations. It is that they are blocked. It is not that they do not have talent. To coin a phrase, Britain's got talent – lots of it. "It is not ability that is unevenly distributed in our society. It is opportunity. In this sense the professions simply reflect a wider problem in British society: a governing assumption in too many of our institutions that progress can be achieved on the basis of a limited pool of talent having access to a limited set of opportunities. Such elitism is unjust socially. And it can no longer work economically."