IT seems Nick Simmonds didn't think he was doing anything controversial when he created myinternswap.com, a site on which parents can offer internships at their work in exchange for similar opportunities for their own kids in other fields.

He had done something like it himself, after all, when he gave his daughter Izzy's friend Marina, a placement at his design agency, and had the favour returned when Marina's mother found Izzy experience at the thinktank where she worked. But some were shocked to find parents advertising placements at their law firm, or the BBC, in exchange for one in some other sector that interested their child.

The wealthy, of course, always did it like this - only the old boy's network didn't function over the internet, but by a little chat in the corner of a garden party, or at a school social. It hasn't always been just the rich that did it - nepotism works across the class scale. The more privileged your background,however, the more elite your connections.

Simmonds claims he is helping to "democratise" that process. In fact, he has made the process quicker and wider in scope, so that those whose parents have something to trade have more choice and opportunity. Is it any fairer than the old system? Only in that it's not about who you know but what you, or your parents, have to offer.

The way internships work has long seemed elitist - particularly when they are unpaid or low-paid and exclude those who haven't the wealth to fund them through. But internships are just an element in a much wider system of exclusion - and hardly the most problematic. While the nation remains divided between those who pay for education and those who receive a state education, and while the former dominate many professions, particularly at UK level, trying to curb parents from swapping work experience opportunities is unlikely to have much impact.

In some ways, the internship is the cherry on the cake, one of the last things a vigilant, middle-class helicopter parent does. He or she will already have thought: "Screw equality, I need to do the best I can for my own child", whether that's private tuition, a nice prep school or a round-the-clock improving-activities programme." Not do so feels like letting your child down. As Kezia Dugdale pointed out last week, when she proposed removing charitable status from private schools: "I don't criticise any parent who sends their kid to private school - at the end of the day they want the best for their children."

Yet, at the same time, the current consensus favours a socially mobile society, almost every political party has declared an interest in helping foster such a climate. James Caan, Nick Clegg's advisor on the issue, said he wanted middle class parents to stop using their connections to get their children internships at top companies. Labour's Alan Milburn recommended interns be paid a minimum wage and John Major declared that he found the current dominance of the privately-educated elite "shocking" and bemoaned the "collapse in social mobility".

At the heart of this problem, however, is not whether one talented person can access an elite job another ends up jobless or cleaning floors. We obsess over mobility because social inequality is so high - the five richest families in the UK are wealthier than the entire bottom 20% of the population. Those at the top feel they have a great deal to lose and therefore frantically try to ensure that their children get the best career breaks, because the penalties of being at the bottom are too terrifying. Those in the middle or bottom are desperate to clamber up. Those at the bottom suffer.

One of the things that is often misunderstood about social mobility is that actually the rate of it doesn't change much (except during major industrial or social revolutions). So we might be better looking to other ways to create fairness in society. We might be better tackling overall inequality through taxation or increased minimum wages. We might be better following what American economist Prof Gregory Clark calls "the Swedish model of compressed inequality", produced in part by strong unions, minimum wages for different sectors and high taxation.

Parents are always going to try to work the system for their children, particularly when they think they have a lot to lose or gain. It's up to society to create systems that somehow level the playing field, not just in terms of opportunities, but in terms of actual life outcomes, of health, wealth and personal security.

Paid internships would help. So would systems that facilitate connections between businesses and schools. Let's hope that Nicola Sturgeon's new poverty advisor, Naomi Eisenstadt, also comes up with some radical and challenging ideas. But actually, the thing that would really make the difference is if those at the bottom had enough, and those at the top didn't have so ridiculously too much.