As the nation adjusts to its new Labour government, my phone has been pinging all week with non-stop messages. The subject my friends want to discuss? The educational background of those who make up Keir Starmer’s new cabinet – and the glorious fact that it’s the same as ours. For the first time ever, the experience of those who are running the country reflects that of most people who live here.
Let me recap. Twenty-three ministers – 92 per cent of the cabinet – went to comprehensive schools. In fact, Parrs Wood High School in Didsbury, south Manchester, boasts two alumnae in the new cabinet – two more than Eton. Only one cabinet member went to a private school, while Starmer himself went to a grammar school; by contrast, two-thirds of Rishi Sunak’s cabinet went to private school. Since 2010, that figure has stood at an average of around 60 per cent, despite only 7 per cent of the country being educated privately.
Watching Rachel Reeves, Wes Streeting, Angela Rayner et al get off to an impressive start has put an undeniable spring in the step of people like me, who spent seven years at the local comp. “The more I see of them, the more hopeful I feel,” read one WhatsApp from a usually cynical member of my circle.
We’ve been so used to being governed by former private-school pupils that the joy of seeing people like us take over has caught us off guard. But that joy is real, because where the leaders of the country went to school matters in a very real way.
The hope is that this cabinet will have a deeper understanding of the issues facing the people they represent, and, more importantly, amid all the hand-wringing about Labour’s imposition of VAT on private schools, serve as a reminder that a state education is not something to be feared.
State schools can produce smart and capable leaders who can succeed in the world of politics, business and beyond. You can be a world-renowned author (Zadie Smith) or a famous news presenter (Robert Peston). With so much damning rhetoric surrounding our state system, it is easy to forget that so few of the country’s children are educated privately.
While they have dominated positions of power so far, people like Streeting, who grew up in an East End council flat and whose comprehensive education got him into Cambridge University and ultimately the role of secretary of state, can become an inspiration for kids who might assume that such a career is “not for people like us”.
I’ve heard people say that their parents had to send them to private school because “education was so important to them”, as if other children’s families just weren’t that bothered. Others say their parents kept them out of the state system because they were “gifted” (honestly, someone once told me this); as if only an eye-wateringly expensive education could provide the level of cosseting required by such a rare, special orchid.
In fact, a landmark 2014 report by the Higher Education Funding Council for England found that state-school pupils were more likely to gain a 2:1 or first-class degree than those who achieved the same A-level results at an independent school.
This suggests that the state system provides a more than solid academic foundation; perhaps because, with so many pupils spanning different abilities, there’s no time for spoon-feeding. To excel at a comprehensive, you have to learn to think for yourself.
That’s not to say that there aren’t a host of advantages to private schools, among them being smaller class sizes, access to 10 times more green space than state pupils, and an automatic entree into a certain social stratum where the right connections can help. Three times more money is spent on a child attending a fee-paying school than one educated by the state. You don’t have to be “chippy” to recognise that this isn’t fair; the head start is exactly what parents pay for.
A study by the Sutton Trust and the Social Mobility Commission in 2019 found that a tiny elite of privately educated people dominate the most powerful positions in our society. Those holding the top jobs in politics, the judiciary, media and business are five times more likely to have been to private school than the general population.
The hope is that, by recognising the ‘comp’ in ‘competence’, as a country, we can start to champion our state education system and not fear it
However, these people don’t necessarily occupy those positions because they are brighter or better. According to Robert Verkaik in his book Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain: “The subtle networks of the privately schooled help to create a system of self-perpetuating advantage and social immobility.”
He argues that these networks can “bristle with unconscious prejudice”, something I’ve experienced countless times. When I first arrived at Oxford, I assumed that, because I had grown up in a nice house in a middle-class part of North Yorkshire, I would fit in – an illusion that was quickly shattered when someone drew attention to my accent and joked that, as I’d gone to a comp, I’d probably been given a place to fulfil a quota.
One friend who went to boarding school recently showed me a letter given to his younger brother, who is still there. It warned A-level pupils to raise their game because a public school education no longer guarantees entitlement to a place at Oxbridge. Which would have been fine, except for its claim that they would now be battling against people from “unglamorous backgrounds”, a phrase that, once seen in black and white, can’t ever be unseen.
This sense of “us” and “them” can also show its face as we navigate the world of work. In one of my first jobs, I encountered a man named Sebastian, who clocked my flattened “A”s and said: “I know how this sounds, but you’re lucky they gave you a job.” I didn’t know whether to try to impress him with my Oxford degree or blow his tiny mind with the revelation that my uncle was a coal miner.
Similarly, I have a friend who was once introduced to her big media boss who, after realising she wasn’t the product of a private education, peered over his nose and asked if she had even been to university, before asking if she was “happy that she wasn’t an air hostess”.
It feels astonishing that someone who went to a comprehensive school can still encounter prejudice from the people around them who can’t see past such lazy assumptions. This mentality doesn’t just create barriers to entry into various professions for those from less privileged backgrounds; it can also result in a financial penalty that can span the length of a person’s career.
While David Cameron vowed in 2016 to make the Conservatives “the party of the equal shot” during his second term as prime minister, in 2024, social mobility is at its worst in more than 50 years, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). In the UK, it takes five generations to move from a low-income background to the medium-income bracket, compared with Denmark, where it takes just two.
While a lot of work has been done to widen recruitment for entry-level jobs, a truer indication of how egalitarian a workplace is can be found in how people move up the ranks once they are employed there. A landmark 2022 report by KPMG found that someone’s socio-economic background had the strongest effect on how quickly they progressed within a company, with individuals from a low-income demographic taking an average of 19 per cent longer to progress to the next level.
How can it be right that the greatest predictor of someone’s success can be the profession of their highest-earning parent when that person was just a child?
Currently, the UK’s 2,600 private schools are all exempt from VAT. Additionally, the 1,300 schools with charitable status – which Labour has no plans to remove – pay no corporation tax, capital gains tax or stamp duty. They also benefit from inheritance tax relief and gift aid on donations.
Labour’s plan to remove the VAT exemption and business rate relief, likely to come into effect in January 2025, is based on its belief that these tax privileges are currently awarded to a sector already significantly better funded than state schools, and that they are unfair.
The policy could raise £2.6bn, according to the IFS, which could allow a 2 per cent increase in state-school spending in England. The plan is to spend the money on recruiting 6,500 more teachers.
There have been dire warnings that the policy will spark a mass exodus from the private sector, swamping overstretched state schools even further, with predictions ranging from 40,000 to 100,000 extra pupils needing to be accommodated.
The government doesn’t expect this to happen, but even if it does, figures from the Department for Education show that 85 per cent of local authorities have more unfilled places in state primary and secondary schools than they have privately educated pupils.
Research by the Sutton Trust shows that although state schools across the socio-economic spectrum are facing major budgetary challenges, “those with more affluent parents are able to draw on those financial resources as a buffer”. Highly motivated middle-class parents can help turn schools’ fortunes around with their contributions, including via fundraising events.
It’s not just cash that these parents bring. Parent-school interactions play an important role in raising overall standards and attainment; you only have to look at areas that have been gentrified to see how quickly a “sink” school can turn into a “star” school as its cohort becomes more mixed.
So, perhaps an influx of pupils who might otherwise have gone to private school could help to raise standards for everyone – something that Fiona Millar, a former adviser to Cherie Blair and an educational campaigner, has long argued.
Few would deny that equality of opportunity is a good guiding principle for a healthy and functioning society. The hope is that by recognising the “comp” in “competence”, as a country, we can start to champion our state education system and not fear it.
This doesn’t have to be seen as a race to the bottom driven by the politics of envy. Instead, we can start to break down some of those centuries-old prejudices that still define us, and begin to create a truly meritocratic society that even Conservative prime ministers have claimed to desire.
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