Medical schools should widen the pool of talent from which doctors are recruited by making it easier for youngsters from poorer backgrounds to study medicine, a report has urged.

Labour's former health secretary Alan Milburn, the government's independent reviewer on social mobility, accused medicine and other professions of failing to make "any great galvanising effort" to open their doors to disadvantaged students.

His update on progress since an earlier report in 2009 will say that there should be more effort to give teenagers from state schools work experience in the professions, including one-year foundation courses at medical schools.

But representatives of the professions insisted they were already taking action to open up their ranks to a broader range of candidates.

Louis Armstrong, chairman of the organisation Professions for Good, said: "Professions are now much more aware of the need for, and value of, diversifying both their membership and their routes of entry.

"Many professions now have a range of ways to join and qualify, including non-graduate routes."

Milburn's report is expected to say that 83% of jobs created in the next decade will be in the professions, increasing the proportion of the working population in professional careers from 42% to 46% by 2020.

This ought to provide an opportunity for increased movement between the classes of the kind seen in the 1950s, as long as the doors to jobs are kept open for people from all backgrounds, the report is expected to say.

But Milburn told the Guardian: "We won't get a more mobile society unless we create more of a level playing field of opportunity.

"With medicine and with too many other professions, I see no great galvanising effort to change.

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Medicine And Law 'Shut Out' Poorer Students