In the second year of the Second World War, the days of England’s public schools appeared numbered. Britain was facing its darkest days, yet some politicians and reformers believed the malign dominance of the public schools was almost as serious a threat to society as the Nazi armies waiting on the other side of the Channel.
George Orwell declared that an entrenched system of private education was incompatible with a healthy democracy. He wrote in The Lion and the Unicorn: ‘We could start by abolishing the autonomy of the public schools and the older universities and flooding them with State-aided pupils chosen simply on grounds of ability.’ Even Winston Churchill conceded reform was inevitable and urged his ministers to find ways to flood the public schools with poor pupils chosen by local authorities.1 But as we have discovered, this all came to nothing.
Britain is a very different place now. Rapid advancements in civil rights, communication, transport and technology would make our country unrecognisable to Orwell and the politicians of his day. But in one respect it is more familiar than ever: hugely disproportionate power is wielded by an elite group of citizens schooled at a select group of institutions. Indeed, there were more privately educated ministers in Theresa May’s 2017 cabinet than Clement Attlee’s in 1946.
In two decades of research the Sutton Trust has consistently demonstrated that the UK’s top echelons of society are dominated by those educated at private schools. It bears repeating that public school alumni constitute 74 per cent of senior judges, 71 per cent of senior officers in the armed forces, 55 per cent of permanent secretaries in Whitehall, 53 per cent of senior diplomats, 50 per cent of members of the House of Lords and 45 per cent of public body chairs. So, too, 44 per cent of business leaders on the Sunday Times Rich List, 43 per cent of newspaper columnists, 33 per cent of MPs and half of BBC staff. A place at a public school increases the chances of picking up an Oscar or competing for Britain at the Olympics.
The public school system of preferment and privilege has evolved over hundreds of years and now operates as a parallel, stealth state. In 1969 this was how Harold Wilson’s public school commission, itself dominated by privately educated heads, openly assessed the link between public school education and advantage: ‘The public schools are not divisive simply because they are exclusive. An exclusive institution becomes divisive when it arbitrarily confers upon its members advantages and powers over the rest of society. The public schools confer such advantages on an arbitrarily selected membership, which already starts with an advantageous position in life. There is no sign that these divisions will disappear if the schools are left alone. They themselves deplore this. It is time we helped them to change a situation which was not of their making.’2
But successive governments, conflicted by their own links to public schools, have failed to tackle the problem. My research shows that since 1806 Edward Heath is the only elected British prime minister to have no personal involvement with the private education sector. Gordon Brown, who did not win a general election, is the only prime minister to both attend a state school and send his children to one.3
The public school business is booming like it has never boomed before. Latest figures show that more people than ever are benefiting from our apartheid education system. In the 1970s, after Harold Wilson’s government had completed its investigation of public schools, only 311,000 children were educated at private schools (1.5 per cent at direct-grant schools and 5.5 per cent at fully independent public schools).4 Today the equivalent figure has doubled. In numerical terms this amounts to 625,000 pupils and a further 32,000 students in countries as diverse as China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Singapore and Qatar.
The Independent Schools Council, the body which represents the vast majority of public schools in the UK, says that there are now more children being educated in its schools than at any time since records began. It means that roughly five million people living in the United Kingdom have been to a private school. Contrast this figure with the 2,708 pupils who were attending the nine leading public schools when concerns were first raised in Victorian Britain.5 Then only 1 per cent of children of the relevant age group was educated privately.6 Today the combined pupil population of those Clarendon schools is more than 8,000 (not including the foreign and expat students who are being taught by British teachers in overseas campuses). Which means that, 150 years after the zenith of the British Empire, almost three times as many boys (and an even greater increase for girls) are now receiving elite educations. In short, Britain has experienced a public school population explosion. To accommodate the record number of pupils the public schools are embarking on ambitious building programmes. Charterhouse (which is going fully co-ed in 2021), Roeadean (a £9-million accommodation refurbishment) and Harrow (which is investing in a new sports complex) are good examples of schools that are increasing their capacity.
Two reports in 2017 highlighted the tight grip that the public schools still hold on the most influential roles in society. A study undertaken by the blue-blood society reference book Debrett’s found that more than two-fifths of the 500 most powerful people in the country were privately educated.7 This was followed in October 2017 by ground-breaking research undertaken by the London School of Economics, which discovered that the alumni of the nine Clarendon public schools are ninety-four times more likely to reach the most powerful positions in British society than those who attended any other school. This unique historical analysis of Who’s Who found that these schools educate roughly 0.15 per cent of all students aged thirteen to eighteen but account for nearly 10 per cent of all Who’s Who entrants. The report concluded that these ‘public schools remain extraordinarily powerful, and any decline in their power has stalled completely over the past sixteen years’.8
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In 1990, when Boris Johnson’s Etonian friend Darius Guppy took a dislike to a reporter from the News of the World who had been investigating his business dealings he called up his old school friend for help. Guppy, who knew Johnson also worked in the media (Daily Telegraph), asked Johnson for the man’s address so he could arrange for the journalist to be beaten up. In the taped conversation between the two OEs, Johnson agreed to find the address for his friend even though he knew exactly what Guppy was planning. Explaining his plan to Johnson, Guppy says: ‘But I am telling you something, Boris, this guy has got my blood up all right, and there is nothing which I won’t do to get my revenge. It’s as simple as that.’
Johnson: If this guy is seriously hurt, I am going to be fucking furious.
Guppy: I guarantee you he will not be seriously hurt.
Johnson: How badly hurt will he be?
Guppy: He will not have a broken limb or a broken arm and he will not, er, he will not be put into intensive care or anything like that. He will probably get a couple of black eyes and a, and a cracked rib or something like that.
Johnson: A cracked rib.
Guppy: Nothing which you didn’t suffer in rugby okay but he will get scared and that is what I want him to do, I want him to get scared, I want him to have no idea who is behind it okay, and I want him to realise that he’s fucked someone off and whoever he’s fucked off is not the sort of person he wants to mess around with. Because I guarantee you, Boris, I guarantee you these people are, you know, if someone hurts their boss or threatens their boss I promise you it’s just total sort of, it’s like they’re like dogs, they are like Alsatians or rottweilers, they love their masters, they are affectionate towards them, they are evil bastards to everyone else.
Johnson: Yeah, yeah, good. Okay Darry now, yeah, I mean I but.
Guppy: You must have faith in me, Boris.9
Three years later Guppy was jailed for an insurance fraud committed several years earlier, which came close to being a perfect crime. He and an associate had paid someone to tie them up and fake a robbery in New York, so that he could claim £1.8 million in insurance. It was his revenge on Lloyd’s, the insurance firm which had ruined his father during a notorious financial scandal in the late 1980s.
Public schools breed networks, not communities. The Guppy/Johnson tape, secretly recorded by Guppy’s suspicious business partner, is a very extreme case of the old boys’ network but it illustrates the strength of the bonds between two Eton schoolmates. This perfectly understandable desire not to ‘let the side down’ can lead good people into bad situations, as C.S. Lewis understood: ‘To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes… Just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig – the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand.’10
In the City and among our professions, where jobs are dominated by privately educated bankers, hedge-fund managers, lawyers and accountants, such associations create perceptions of injustice. What is said and done in the cosy dining rooms of gentlemen’s clubs is based on a shared set of unwritten rules and values.
The London gentlemen’s club scene grew out of a need for aristocrats and the wealthy middle classes to come together in smoke-filled, female-free dining rooms in pursuit of exclusively male pleasures. They quickly descended into dens of iniquity where drinking, gambling and prostitution were all part of the club’s lively entertainment.
One of the most fashionable was Brooks’s in St James’s Street in the West End. Its gambling excesses are legendary, culminating in a story of how in 1785 Lord Cholmondeley placed a bet with Lord Derby that he would win 500 guineas ‘whenever his lordship [fornicates with] a woman in a balloon one thousand yards from the Earth’.
Today these clubs, whose entry is still strictly controlled by the black ball, continue to honour some of their very un-PC traditions. To a greater or lesser degree they are extensions of the public school, an attempt to recapture a lost fraternity. Indeed, one of the most famous was named the Public Schools Club. But perhaps the most curious of them all, raising questions about the clubs’ crossover into public life, is the little-known Beefsteak Club, located in Irving Street near Leicester Square.
In an earlier incarnation, its motto was ‘Beef and liberty!’ and members swore an oath of secrecy to the effect that ‘what happens in the Beefsteak stays in the Beefsteak.’ A similar aura of secrecy surrounds the club today. According to Who’s Who, among its members are the disgraced former MP Brooks Newmark (also a member of White’s; Bedford School) and the Tory minister Rory Stewart (Eton). Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley Johnson (Sherborne), was a member and blocked Michael Gove from joining after Gove stabbed his son in the back during the Tory leadership race. An online version of Who’s Who dated 1 December 2017 tells us that William Shawcross, the chair of the Charity Commission since 2012, was once a member. One of Shawcross’s jobs was to make sure the public schools complied with their charitable status.11
These bastions of masculine entertainment can pose a danger to open democracy. It is the gentlemen’s clubs of London where politicians, bankers and hedge-fund managers meet to do deals and form secret alliances. Because membership lists are not disclosed to the public it is impossible to tell when a minister proposes a policy that favours the interests of members of his club.
The vast majority of these old school tie connections remain hidden from public scrutiny. But in a public forum such as a court of law the dangers of relying on such a narrow group of professionals to run the City is laid bare.
In 2016 Luke Bridgeman, a Bullingdon Club contemporary of David Cameron and George Osborne, was accused of taking confidential client details when he left his job to join a rival firm. Bridgeman’s former company, Marathon Asset Management, a leading London and New York investment manager entrusted with clients’ pensions and savings, decided to sue Bridgeman for £15 million. The case went to the High Court where it was heard by the experienced Mr Justice Leggatt. After a three-week trial, Leggatt ruled that far from the documents being ‘priceless’, any benefit accrued to Marathon would have been ‘extremely modest’. So he ordered Bridgeman to pay just £1 in nominal damages. The case was a bitter blow to Marathon, which spent around £10 million in legal costs. What Marathon may not have been aware of was that George Leggatt, like Bridgeman, was also educated at Eton, although their school lives are separated by a decade.
The judicial rules of conflict of interest say nothing expressly about a judge sitting in judgment where both the judge and one of the parties went to the same school. But Leggatt, whose father also attended Eton, is not just any Old Etonian. In the same year he was presiding over the trial he was also nominated by the Lord Chief Justice to Eton College’s governing body, where he was under a duty to promote and protect the interests of the school. Leggatt, in common with the other fellows of the governing body, made this declaration to the school: ‘I George Leggatt do solemnly profess and declare that I will be faithful to the College of Eton, and do nothing detrimental to it, but will, to the utmost of my power, maintain and support the interests of the same.’12 Leggatt is also bound by a judicial oath to uphold justice. So what was the judge supposed to do in this instance – uphold justice, or do his utmost to support the interests of Eton?
The Marathon litigation neatly illustrates the tiny pool from which the City and the professions are drawn. In 2017 there were 24,281 state and private schools in the UK. If the distribution of the judiciary and City fund managers was fairly drawn from all our schools, these potential conflicts of interest would be far removed.13 But today people who went to private school dominate almost all walks of public life, including the media, the City, ‘magic circle’ law firms and the Bar. In the courts where disputes between the state and the citizen are settled it is exaggerated. Seven per cent of the population are privately educated and yet three-quarters of High Court judges come from private schools; half of them were at boarding schools, where fewer than 1 per cent of pupils go.
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Descendants of Douglas McGarel Hogg, 1st Viscount Hailsham, have held down more top jobs in the law and the City than any other privately educated family. For more than 150 years they have sustained their influence and standing through the patronage of Eton and a number of girls’ public schools.
Douglas McGarel Hogg was educated at Cheam School and Eton College before studying sugar plantations in the West Indies. After serving in the Boer War he was called to the Bar in 1902 and later, as Baron Hailsham, appointed Conservative lord chancellor and secretary of state for war.
His son is Quintin Hogg, an Eton King’s Scholar and a scholar at Christ Church, Oxford, where he was president of the Oxford University Conservative Association and the Oxford Union. His ministerial career began in 1957 when he was made minister of education under Harold Macmillan and served two terms as lord chancellor under Heath and Thatcher. He had five children, all educated privately and with top jobs in the City, the law and Westminster.
The eldest, Douglas Hogg (Eton), became a barrister and Tory government minister. But his unwelcome claim to fame was to be named in the 2009 parliamentary expenses scandal when he asked taxpayers to foot the bill for cleaning the moat which encircles his fifty-acre country estate of Kettlethorpe Hall. His wife Sarah, the journalist and economist who became the first woman to head a FTSE 100 company, went on to take charge of John Major’s Policy Unit. She went to St Mary’s School Ascot and is a former member of the governing board of Eton, where she sent her son. Douglas Hogg’s younger sister Dame Mary Hogg (St Paul’s Girls’ School) was the High Court judge who was criticised in the case of the murder of six-year-old Ellie Butler, whom she had ordered to be returned to her father.14
Douglas and Sarah’s daughter, Charlotte Hogg, was also caught up in controversy recently. Charlotte, educated at the same prestigious school as her mother, had enjoyed a stellar career in the City before being made deputy governor of the Bank of England in 2017, the most senior position ever achieved by a woman in the bank’s history. Indeed, she was tipped to become the first female governor when Governor Mark Carney was due to step down in 2019. But in March 2017 it emerged that she had failed to declare a potential conflict of interest concerning a member of her family: her brother, Quintin Hogg (Eton), also a rising star in the City, had been appointed director of Barclays Investment Bank Strategy Group.15
A key part of Charlotte Hogg’s job was overseeing the regulation of the banks as well as advising on setting interest rates. But she hadn’t disclosed her potential conflict concerning her high-flying brother to her employers at the Bank of England and when she came before a parliamentary hearing she compounded the error by saying she had.
The Treasury select committee, which had interviewed her after her appointment as deputy governor, was less than impressed and delivered a damning verdict. The committee’s report found she had failed ‘over a period of nearly four years to comply with the Code of Conduct, despite numerous procedural reminders and opportunities to do so’. Its report concluded that she had shown a ‘failure to appreciate the seriousness of that history of non-compliance during her tenure as the Bank’s Chief Operating Officer. For at least some of that period, as far as the Committee is aware, her brother was in a senior role at Barclays, dealing with important regulatory matters.’
It was difficult for Charlotte Hogg to defend her oversight. Even the society magazine Tatler had written about the fact the two Hoggs were working in the same industry when the magazine was touting Quintin Hogg’s daughter as a prospective suitor for Prince George.16 Half an hour after the committee published its report, Charlotte Hogg wrote to the governor of the Bank of England, resigning her position.
It is hard not to feel sorry for Hogg because in one sense she was a victim of her own family’s suffocating privilege. She would have been used to operating in a world where relatives and school friends already occupied senior positions of influence. If she had been forced to make a written declaration of a potential conflict every time her path crossed with a family member, she wouldn’t have got much work done. For members of a dynasty like the Hoggs it must be difficult to know when a lunch or meeting with a brother, uncle, aunt or even distant cousin has actually crossed a line and represents a serious risk of conflict. It is only when an objective voice raises a question over these close connections that the obvious appearance of unfairness becomes clear. For this reason the City and its regulators generally turn a blind eye, given that the elite are drawn from such a narrow pool of schools and families.
Going to the right school is the start of the business of getting on in the City. In this respect the City hasn’t really moved on since the days of the first London banking crisis of 1825 when a public school education was a non-negotiable prerequisite for a well-paid job in Threadneedle Street. Today, private education plays just as big a part in the recruitment of bankers and private-equity executives. In 2014 a report for the Sutton Trust by the Boston Consulting Group found that over 50 per cent of leaders of major banks and nearly 70 per cent of heads of private-equity firms were privately educated, while for new banking and private-equity recruits the figures were 34 per cent and 69 per cent respectively. Privately educated bankers tend to hire privately educated bankers, a situation even more likely in private equity.17
A Social Mobility Commission report into access in investment banking reveals why these applicants are likely to be successful. It found that hiring managers have a tendency to ‘recruit for familiarity and similarity’, and focus on perceived ‘fit’. The commission concluded that this mounts a particular challenge for candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds, as it suggests the concept of ‘fit’ is often determined by ‘whether aspirant bankers share a social educational background with current hiring managers’. Entrance is now so skewed that pupils from ten named public schools are one hundred times more likely to apply for the most prestigious business graduate schemes than their peers educated at the bottom 10 per cent of schools, regardless of which universities they went on to.18
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In a healthy democracy it is incumbent upon our fourth estate to shine a light into murky dealings and diagnose the conditions that restrict open and fair competition in careers like banking. The media has shown little hesitation in blaming elites in general terms for everything from Brexit to the Grenfell Tower tragedy. Incestuous groups of fat-cat politicians or champagne-guzzling hedge-fund managers are held up as the cause of our national scandals. But there is much less appetite to investigate the overall complexion of these ‘elites’ or understand why a narrow privately educated class has been allowed to take charge of the country.
The key reason for this is that the media is muted by conflicted privilege just as much as the rest of society. Research carried out by the Sutton Trust found that half of one hundred leading journalists are privately educated. It also showed that the dominance of public schools at the highest levels of newspapers had actually increased since the 1980s.
The Trust considered editors at twenty-two of the country’s leading national newspapers, periodicals and press agencies. In 1986, 41 per cent of those in these posts had been educated at independent schools, 50 per cent at grammar schools and 9 per cent at comprehensives. By 2015, 58 per cent were educated at independent schools, 21 per cent at grammar schools and 21 per cent at comprehensives.19
The industry has been unable to solve long-standing problems of diversity and pay gaps – especially since journalists have been reluctant to report on the shortcomings of a system to which they may owe their jobs. The elements of this conflict were partly exposed in July 2017 when the BBC was forced to publish a list of staff who earned more than £150,000. At first the media’s fire was directed at the huge fees paid to BBC Radio 2 presenter Chris Evans and Match of the Day pundit Gary Lineker. Then attention was turned on the pay gap between the highest paid men compared to the women and the gap between white and non-white managers. The BBC’s China editor Carrie Gracie resigned after she discovered she was being paid at least £40,000 less than the male international editors based abroad.
Only after the outrage had died down did it begin to dawn on one or two journalists that there was an even more serious problem that underpinned all the others. The big salaries were being paid to mostly privately educated men and women by men and women who all went to the same schools. BBC daytime TV presenter Steph McGovern said she had once been told by a manager she was ‘too common’ to be a presenter: ‘It’s not as simple as a gender issue, it’s partly down to class. There are a lot of women who do a similar job to me who are paid a hell of a lot more… who are a lot posher than me.’20
One former BBC reporter who had moved on to Sky did his own investigation into the pay packages and the men and women who earned them. Lewis Goodall, who had spent five years at the BBC, including reporting for its flagship current-affairs programme Newsnight, found that forty-three of the BBC’s best-paid stars went to private schools. Among the exceptions were Gary Lineker and Chris Evans, who have both sent their children to public schools.
Goodall wrote: ‘If we actually talked or even cared about this peculiar taboo, we might begin to see one of the reasons the gender and race pay gaps exist in the first place. Just think about that. If you send your child to private school it increases their chances of being one of the biggest names in TV and media by a factor of six.’
He added: ‘The gender pay gap may be too large but it’s not nearly as big as the class pay gap for the people who never made it in the first place because of their background. The injustice is pretty overwhelming: after all, are we really saying that those who are lucky enough to be born into households which can afford to pay for private school fees are six times more talented? Six times better imbued with the skills required to be a successful BBC actor, sports presenter or journalist?’21 When grammar school-educated John Humphrys finally lays down his microphone, the entire complement of broadcasters (as well as the editor) of Britain’s premier current-affairs programme will be public school-educated.
Former Today programme editor Rod Liddle says:
When I joined the BBC in the late 1980s I was astonished at the preponderance of public school monkeys: more than two-thirds of the people who worked on the Today programme were privately educated and five of them were from Eton. Not all of them were fantastically stupid but they nearly all subscribed to the same political agenda – a sort of self-effacing, if not self-hating, limp-wristed Corbyn-lite, which they thought was not really political at all, but merely an expression of well-bred civility.
There were one or two state-educated grammar school kids who viewed this anodyne morass with a certain contempt. And there was me from my comp. At the end of my first week I mentioned the high-born nature of the programme staff to a colleague, Justin Webb. ‘Ah, but think how proud your mum and dad would be to know that you’re mixing with people like us,’ Justin replied with a smile, scything through my class chippiness with great elan. A good joke from a very good journalist. But my point still held.22
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Today’s public schools are perfectly set up to get the best possible academic and social results for their pupils. They use tried-and-tested systems to multiply the privilege and wealth that pupils bring with them to school. Given how far down the track these kids are before they start their lives, it’s hardly surprising that they go on to land prosperous and successful careers. We have already seen how networking and unconscious bias can accelerate this success once students leave school and university.
But the most direct performance measurement for the modern public school is the number of its pupils who win places at top universities. This is because it is one of the most important factor for parents deciding where to send their children. And for some it means just one thing: can you get my child into Oxford or Cambridge?
In 2017 a dozen public schools in London and the home counties sent 500 students to Oxford and Cambridge, which that year had a combined intake of roughly 5,700 from state and public schools.23 At Westminster School 44 per cent of its school leavers in 2016 secured Oxbridge offers.24 One pupil at Haberdashers’ Aske’s in north London has claimed that so many of its pupils were winning places at Oxford and Cambridge (fifty-five per year in the 1980s) that the colleges tried to impose quotas.25
In 2016 the London school Merchant Taylors’ announced its highest Oxbridge success rate for sixteen years. The school proclaimed:
An exceptional cohort of twenty-one boys received offers from Oxford (ten) and Cambridge (eleven) this year. This is the largest number since 2000, approximating to 15 per cent of the Upper Sixth Form and almost 50 per cent of all applicants. Our pupils have been offered places to read a range of subjects, including Engineering, English, History, Law, and Natural Sciences. Pupils can be extremely proud of their efforts, with the competition for places becoming more intense every year. They all grasped the enormity of the challenge and made great use of extension seminars and mock interviews, as well as engaging in sustained reading in their chosen discipline.26
At most state schools entry rates are meaningless because their pupils have never won a place at Oxbridge.
This disadvantage is compounded by the fact that many of the older public schools share long and esoteric associations with England’s ancient universities. The public schools were founded as feeders to Oxbridge colleges. King’s College, Cambridge was established in 1441 by Henry VI as a sister college to Eton, while Winchester College, our oldest public school, was expressly established as a feeder for New College, Oxford. Westminster School has similar ties to Christ Church, Oxford, and Trinity College, Cambridge.27 These ties have been strengthened and formalised over the years through the government and stewardship of the schools. Eton’s statutes still ensure that two of its fellows are senior members of Oxbridge colleges. Collaboration between the institutions is supported by the maintenance of links between the schools and their alumni who hold influential positions across the Oxbridge estate, including the admissions departments.
This incestuous relationship is one reason why the overall Oxbridge undergraduate intake from private schools is stubbornly stuck at 45 per cent. Of greater concern is evidence which suggests the state/private school attainment gap might be getting worse. Data released by the Higher Education Statistics Agency found that 55.7 per cent of Oxford’s 2015–16 intake were from state schools, compared to 57.7 per cent in 2010. Latest figures show that the absolute numbers of state school students peaked at Oxford in 2002 and in 2008 at Cambridge. The number of state school undergraduates to Oxford has been steadily falling since. And while raw figures indicate a downward trend in privately educated pupils, this is not the case when the growing numbers of privately educated overseas students are taken into account. Overseas undergraduates to Oxbridge have more than doubled in the last fifteen years. The public school figure is further skewed by those who moved from private to state schools for their A-levels.28 There is also a serious disparity in Oxbridge acceptance rates with state school applicants who win offers 25 per cent less likely to take up their place at Oxford or Cambridge than those offered to pupils at independent schools.29
A former headmaster of Westminster School was once candid enough to spell out exactly how the relationship between the private sector and Oxbridge worked in favour of public school admissions. John Rae told how Oxbridge dons and other influential figures from the colleges were regularly wined and dined at lavish events hosted at Westminster School. He happily explained how ‘over dinner’ deals were done to get their less able students places at the colleges.30
It is not possible to say how much of this kind of horse trading for Oxbridge admissions goes on today. The selection process is of course more transparent and rigorous but a word in the ear in support of a ‘promising’ public school applicant cannot be without influence. Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, says that when he went to university his school, Repton, always had a reserved place at Peterhouse College, Cambridge, for a History scholar: ‘When I didn’t get into Peterhouse my school tutor rang up the college to inquire why. This still goes on today. The private school tutors, who often make it their business to know the admissions tutor, don’t hesitate to pick up the phone. I’m not sure the same can be said for a busy comprehensive teacher who has many other roles in the school. This is an advantage that plays in favour of public schools. It’s perfectly legal and above board but it is unfair.’31
The Oxbridge factor matters because an Oxbridge education still determines who runs Britain. This was demonstrable of David Cameron’s second cabinet, where 60 per cent had Oxbridge degrees.
The Sutton Trust argues: ‘Large educational gaps remain and entrenched privilege continues in higher education. Students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are still far less likely to attend university and students from the poorest households are fifty-five times less likely than independent school students to attend Oxford or Cambridge.’32
Barnaby Lenon, the chair of the Independent Schools Council, accepts his schools do have an advantage over state schools but he says it’s got nothing to do with the historical links between the public schools and the Oxbridge colleges. ‘They do have a slightly unfair advantage. And I explained this once to Michael Gove, but he didn’t seem particularly interested. The reason they have an unfair advantage is not because of contacts, it’s not because of networks, it’s because of experience. If you are a school that every year has, let’s say, three students applying to read History at Oxford, and you compare that to a school that has one student every ten years applying to read History at Oxford, you’ve got a completely different level of experience.’33
In 2017 the Labour MP David Lammy decided to investigate the social backgrounds of Oxbridge students. What he discovered was that four-fifths of students accepted at Oxbridge between 2010 and 2015 had parents with top managerial or professional jobs. He also established that this trend in elitism was getting worse.
The direct link between an Oxbridge degree and political power was fully exposed in Andy Beckett’s excellent analysis of how an Oxford University degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics is the secret to getting a top job in the business of running Britain. Beckett began by setting the scene:
Monday, 13 April 2015 was a typical day in modern British politics. An Oxford University graduate in philosophy, politics and economics (PPE), Ed Miliband, launched the Labour party’s general election manifesto. It was examined by the BBC’s political editor, Oxford PPE graduate Nick Robinson, by the BBC’s economics editor, Oxford PPE graduate Robert Peston, and by the director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Oxford PPE graduate Paul Johnson. It was criticised by the prime minister, Oxford PPE graduate David Cameron. It was defended by the Labour shadow chancellor, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Balls.
Elsewhere in the country, with the election three weeks away, the Liberal Democrat chief secretary to the Treasury, Oxford PPE graduate Danny Alexander, was preparing to visit Kingston and Surbiton, a vulnerable London seat held by a fellow Lib Dem minister, Oxford PPE graduate Ed Davey. In Kent, one of Ukip’s two MPs, Oxford PPE graduate Mark Reckless, was campaigning in his constituency, Rochester and Strood. Comments on the day’s developments were being posted online by Michael Crick, Oxford PPE graduate and political correspondent of Channel 4 News.
On the BBC Radio 4 website, the Financial Times statistics expert and Oxford PPE graduate Tim Harford presented his first election podcast. On BBC1, Oxford PPE graduate and Newsnight presenter Evan Davies conducted the first of a series of interviews with party leaders. In the print media, there was an election special in the Economist magazine, edited by Oxford PPE graduate Zanny Minton-Beddoes; a clutch of election articles in the political magazine Prospect, edited by Oxford PPE graduate Bronwen Maddox; an election column in the Guardian by Oxford PPE graduate Simon Jenkins; and more election coverage in the Times and the Sun, whose proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, studied PPE at Oxford.
Beckett concluded: ‘More than any other course at any other university, more than any revered or resented private school, and in a manner probably unmatched in any other democracy, Oxford PPE pervades British political life.’34
Lee Elliot Major of the Sutton Trust says: ‘All this would be fine if England’s two ancient universities attracted bright teenagers from a diverse swathe of social and economic backgrounds. But we know despite valiant efforts by the universities, entry into their hallowed colleges continues to be dominated by those from the most privileged families. It means that those in charge of us are not reflective of the people they are intended to serve, or drawn from the widest pool of available talents.’35
There are other damaging aspects to an overabundance of graduates from privately educated backgrounds. By cramming such students into ancient colleges and indulging them in tradition, custom and costume, the transition from public school to university is made almost seamless.
Journalist and broadcaster Laura Barton, who wrote and presented a three-part series for BBC Radio 4 called The Confidence Trick, says: ‘The design of a public school such as Eton has much in common with, say, the colleges of Oxbridge, as well as the Inns of Court (where barristers and judges are trained) and the Houses of Parliament. If you grow up among these kinds of buildings, you are not only less likely to be daunted by their grandeur but, on the contrary, you will feel at home, as if you belong there and they speak your language’.36
Such cloying familiarity helps to create the conditions for social segregation. Public school graduates gravitate to one another, joining clubs, societies and elites that reinforce the myth that their privileged world is commonplace. But Oxford’s Bullingdon Club and Cambridge’s private school-dominated Apostles and the many other invitation-only associations shut out the rest of society.
For Cambridge alumnus Times columnist Matthew Parris the experience made him feel like he was back in South Africa: ‘At Clare College (and Clare was one of the least snooty colleges) a broad equivalence in intelligence and learning was more or less assumed, but there was a clear social divide between state-school and public-school boys. It was as sharp as it was intangible. Although privately educated in Swaziland, I was quietly assigned to the grammar school gang, and felt comfortable there. More than forty years later I still do.’37
Oxford and Cambridge are not alone in their popularity with the public schools. There is evidence that attempts to reduce the number of privately educated graduates is boosting public school pupil entry levels at other universities, which are developing their own elitist enclaves. Nearly 40 per cent of Durham’s entrants were privately educated, along with 39 per cent of those starting at Bristol, and 34 per cent of starters at Imperial College London.38
Less academic public school children tend to club together at fashionable universities like Newcastle whose alumni include the current Duke of Westminster and his sister, and St Andrews, where Prince William first met Kate Middleton. In this respect the business and family connections acquired at school give them a critical advantage over their state-educated counterparts, and these graduates get better jobs and higher pay than their state-educated equivalents who leave the same university with the same degree. The Sutton Trust calls this ‘opportunity hoarding’.39
A 2014 study by the Social Market Foundation found that UK children who are privately educated are likely to earn almost £200,000 more between the ages of twenty-six and forty-two than those attending state schools. This is particularly so at the ‘magic circle’ law firms, which in 2017 were still recruiting 57 per cent of their trainees from private schools. The correlation between bigger salaries and private education is perfectly illustrated by a 2018 study which showed that eight out of ten starting salaries of £100,000 are awarded to privately educated candidates.40
This financial advantage is described by Francis Green, professor of Work and Education Economics at the UCL Institute of Education, as an important part of the ‘public school premium’.41
But Professor Green goes further, saying that even the choice of marriage partner is unconsciously guided by educational background. Professor Green and Dr Golo Henseke, from the Centre for Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economies and Societies (LLAKES), analysed survey data on 75,000 adults in the UK gathered from 1991 to 2013. They found that privately educated women are four times more likely than their state-educated counterparts to marry a man who was privately educated. The researchers suggested that one reason why ‘like married like’ was that men and women from private schools were more likely to have friends in common, work in similar careers and hold shared values. Professor Green found that the privately educated husbands of privately educated women earned an average of £35,900 a year, compared with the £25,900 earned by state-educated husbands of state-educated women.42
These public school families can secure and protect their wealth by ensuring their own children are privately educated. Public school education is the parent of nepotism which helps a narrow pool of people consolidate their hold on power and influence. In this way the cycle of privilege is completed and the factories of advantage continue churning out better-equipped children.
David Willetts concedes that public schools are agents of inequality because pupils are ‘buying a host of special advantages including very good advice about how to get into the best universities… And that is in some sense unfair, but trying to assault it head on would be less effective than trying to offset these problems elsewhere.’ He says that the ‘ultimate justification’ for intervention is that ‘the kids who come from tougher backgrounds outperform them [public school students] at university.’43
The Office for Fair Access is trying to give universities the confidence to look beyond prior attainment and at the underlying potential of the students. Oxford and Cambridge have invested heavily in outreach projects to boost the numbers of disadvantaged and ethnic minority students. And a number of Russell Group universities, notably King’s College and Queen Mary’s College, University of London, are admitting people from a wide range of backgrounds but still turning out graduates with good degrees: ‘So you can offset it,’ says Willetts, ‘by a combination of legitimising universities exercising some discretion in their admission procedures and even putting pressure on them to do it.’ But the truth is that the Oxbridge colleges are sitting on £11 billion’s worth of endowments and in receipt of £800 million of government funding each year. That’s an awful lot of public money being used to maintain the huge advantage privately educated students have over those from disadvantaged backgrounds in securing a place at Cambridge or Oxford.44
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Why does it matter that people who pay for their education end up with more power, better jobs, more money and greater success in sport and acting than those who don’t? Where is the harm in letting rich people purchase better lives? After all, this is how capitalism has always worked.
On the most basic level such a system gravely offends the principle of equality of opportunity, the foundation of any democracy. It is also a form of corruption because it permits people to bypass the rules of professional advancement by paying membership fees to a self-selecting group of lottery winners. Unchecked, such a system works against meritocracy and establishes a socially divided society where a minority increasingly controls a majority of the national wealth, earned by the hard work of the majority. The test of a working democracy is how much trust the people place in it. When citizens no longer believe the system is serving everyone fairly and, no matter how hard they work or study, they will never escape the life into which they were born, then the glue that holds society together starts to come unstuck.
There is now research to show this is exactly what is happening in Britain. In 2017 just two-fifths of UK citizens surveyed by the Sutton Trust believe that ‘people have equal opportunities to get on’ in society. This is a significant drop on the 53 per cent of the public who agreed with those sentiments just a decade before.45
The established political parties no longer understand their membership, never mind the wider electorate. So a despairing electorate looks to demagogues who promise simple solutions to complex problems. Far-right groups and far-left populism have already started to change the character of our politics.
When Orwell was warning about the dangers of a divided education system, 35 per cent of the income went to the richest 10 per cent of the people. After the Second World War Britain gradually became a more equal society so that by 1979 just 21 per cent of the income went to 10 per cent of the population. But since then the trend has reversed so that today the distribution of wealth is much more similar to the period when Orwell was alive.46 Today Britain is experiencing the longest wage stagnation since the end of the war, threatening the economic model of neoliberalism. The UK sits on its own as a rich economy in which profits have risen but wages continue to fall in real terms.47 Since the crash Britain’s wealth, supercharged by rocketing house prices, has risen by more than £4 trillion, almost half of which has accrued to the richest 10 per cent of households. Fifteen per cent of adults in Britain have either no share of the nation’s record £11.1 trillion of wealth, or have negative wealth.48 Fourteen million people, one in five of the population, live in poverty; 400,000 more children and 300,000 more pensioners have been added to this number since 2013.49 2021 is predicted to be the worst year for living standards for the poorest half of households since comparable records began in the mid-1960s.50
Britain’s widening wealth gap has had a profound impact on social mobility, which has actually stalled since the 1980s. Instead of talking about upward mobility, we are confronting the dangers of downward mobility. This means it is now harder to climb up the ladder to a better job and easier to fall down the ladder to a worse job.51 Indeed, Millennials (born from the 1980s) are likely to be the first generation in modern times to earn less than their parents. The biggest obstacle to social mobility is ‘large educational gaps and entrenched privilege in higher education’.52
In London the helpless predicament of the non-property-owning classes is at its most bleak. Huge swathes of the capital are still owned by generational ‘toffs’ – a handful of grand families controlling many of its freeholds. Very little is known about most of them, and that is how they like it. A further tract of real estate has been bought up by foreign families using investment vehicles to take major stakes in the heart of the capital. Many of these families have made their fortunes in the chaotic liberalisations of the economies of the former Soviet Union and China and have chosen to base their lives in Britain. A key strategy in retaining and spreading their Western wealth is buying public school educations for their children. In turn, the public schools are committed to guarding the privacy of these mega-rich families who use them to assimilate into the British elite.
There is another cost to the country. The education and elevation of a narrow group of people who come from boarding schools based in the south of England and focused on London, Oxford and Cambridge only exacerbates Britain’s economic north–south divide. It perpetuates a mindset that puts the south and London at the centre of national affairs and treats the rest of the country as an economically irrelevant backwater.
So how will it all end?
Robert Halfon MP, the Conservative chair of the influential parliamentary education select committee, warns that social injustice is ‘endemic’ in the education system. He says we are failing our children’s futures with far too few disadvantaged students going to the best universities.53
For Justin Madders MP, chair of the parliamentary committee on social mobility, it is the most pressing issue facing Britain. ‘In some respects it’s getting worse,’ he warns. ‘The number of professional jobs is going to contract over the next couple of decades and those people who have connections and advantages are going to be at the front of the queue… We look at how young people got into these professions in the first place. Work experience and internships are a big part of that, but actually there are shocking stats about how many work placements in some professions are settled on the basis of some prior connection to that particular institution. You’re a City lawyer, your son is interested in architecture, one of your major clients is in architecture, so it’s very easy to say, well, here’s an idea for you.’54
He says that 50 per cent of people in law, banking and finance are filled by graduates who have already worked for that employer in some capacity. ‘That says to me there is a network that still operates that puts people at the front of the queue. People obviously don’t see anything wrong in getting work experience with clients or contacts, but what it does mean is that those people who are already known to these sorts of people and professions get these opportunities.’ Everybody else has to take their chance on sending a blind CV in the post and hope it lands on the right desk.
But Madders predicts: ‘I think it will be even more of a challenge because those elite professional jobs will be in shorter supply. Which means that to break through the class barrier you have to be even more outstanding.’
Since the close of the nineteenth century the world has been gradually evolving into a much fairer place. Basic human rights, like the right to food, shelter and education, have spread across the globe. At the end of the Cold War we could all expect to look forward to more years of even greater shared equality. But according to the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of the bestselling book Sapiens, equality is about to take a very serious turn for the worse.
He argues that ‘humans basically have just two types of skills – physical and cognitive – and if computers outperform us in both, they might outperform us in the new jobs just as in the old ones. Consequently, billions of humans might become unemployable, and we will see the emergence of a huge new class: the useless class.’55
Mankind has always depended on a hierarchical society led by an elite. In the future the elite will not just be those who hold most of the wealth, they will also be ones who have protected access to a skilled job. And privileged education will be at an even greater premium.
Unless we urgently tackle the drivers of inequality and break up networks of advantage there can be no equality of opportunity. Disenfranchisement has already set in, which, in turn, is beginning to breed resentment and grievance. This has already led to the protest movements that have seen the rise of Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum, and brought us Brexit and Donald Trump. But these are merely the symptoms of a much deeper malaise.