What elite American universities can learn from Oxbridge

Simon Kuper in The FT  

Both the US and UK preselect their adult elites early, by admitting a few 18-year-olds into brand-name universities. Everyone else in each age cohort is essentially told, “Sorry kid, probably not in this lifetime.”  

The happy few come disproportionately from rich families. Many Ivy League colleges take more students from the top 1 per cent of household incomes than the bottom 60 per cent. Both countries have long agonised about how to diversify the student intake. Lots of American liberals worry that ancestral privilege will be further cemented at some point this month, when the Supreme Court is expected to outlaw race-conscious affirmative action in university admissions. 

Whatever the court decides, US colleges have ways to make themselves more meritocratic. They could learn from Britain’s elite universities, which, in just the past few years, have become much more diverse in class and ethnicity. It’s doable, but only if you want to do it — which the US probably doesn’t. 

Pressure from the government helped embarrass Oxford and Cambridge into overhauling admissions. (And yes, we have to fixate on Oxbridge because it’s the main gateway to the adult elite.) On recent visits to both universities, I was awestruck by the range of accents, and the scale of change. Oxbridge colleges now aim for “contextual admissions”, including the use of algorithms to gauge how much disadvantage candidates have surmounted to reach their academic level. For instance: was your school private or state? What proportion of pupils got free school meals? Did your parents go to university?  

Admissions tutors compare candidates’ performance in GCSEs — British exams taken aged 16 — to that of their schoolmates. Getting seven As at a school where the average is four counts for more than getting seven at a school that averages 10. The brightest kid at an underprivileged school is probably smarter than the 50th-best Etonian. 

Oxbridge has made admissions interviews less terrifying for underprivileged students, who often suffer from imposter syndrome. If a bright working-class kid freezes at interview, one Oxford tutor told me he thinks: “I will not let you talk yourself out of a place here.” And to counter the interview coaching that private-school pupils receive, Oxford increasingly hands candidates texts they haven’t seen before. 

Oxbridge hosts endless summer schools and open days for underprivileged children. The head of one Oxford college says that it had at least one school visit every day of term. The pupils are shown around by students from similar backgrounds. The message to the kids is: “You belong here.” 

It’s working. State schools last year provided a record 72.5 per cent of Cambridge’s British undergraduate admissions. From 2018 to 2022, more than one in seven UK-domiciled Oxford undergraduates came from “socio-economically disadvantaged areas”. Twenty-eight per cent of Oxford students identified as “black and minority ethnic”; slightly more undergraduates now are women than men. Academics told me that less privileged students are more likely to experience social or mental-health problems, but usually get good degrees. These universities haven’t relaxed their standards. On the contrary, by widening the talent pool, they are finding more talent. 

Elite US colleges could do that even without affirmative action. First, they would have to abolish affirmative action for white applicants. A study led by Peter Arcidiacono of Duke University found that more than 43 per cent of white undergraduates admitted to Harvard from 2009 to 2014 were recruited athletes, children of alumni, “on the dean’s interest list” (typically relatives of donors) or “children of faculty and staff”. Three-quarters wouldn’t have got in otherwise. This form of corruption doesn’t exist in Britain. One long-time Oxford admissions tutor told me that someone in his job could go decades without even being offered a donation as bait for admitting a student. Nor do British alumni expect preferential treatment for their children. 

The solutions to many American societal problems are obvious if politically unfeasible: ban guns, negotiate drug prices with pharmaceutical companies. Similarly, elite US universities could become less oligarchical simply by agreeing to live with more modest donations — albeit still the world’s biggest. Harvard’s endowment of $50.9bn is more than six times that of the most elite British universities. 

But US colleges probably won’t change, says Martin Carnoy of Stanford’s School of Education. Their business model depends on funding from rich people, who expect something in return. He adds: “It’s the same with the electoral system. Once you let private money into a public good, it becomes unfair.” 

Both countries have long been fake meritocracies. The US intends to remain one.

We know life is a game of chance, so why not draw lots to see who gets the job?

Sonia Sodha in The Guardian

Remove human bias from the interview process and the world might start to become a fairer place 

 

Interviews are an unreliable way of selecting the best person for the job. Photograph: Alamy


The sweaty palms, the swotting, the tricky question that prompts your heart to plummet: job interviews are no one’s idea of a good time. The other side of the equation is hardly fun either: days out of a busy schedule spent interviewing candidates, some of whom you know within a couple of minutes you would never offer a job.

Interviews are time-consuming for all involved. But we persist in doing them because recruitment decisions are some of the most important we take in the workplace and it follows we should invest time and energy into a robust recruitment process, right?

Wrong. It is long established that unstructured interviews are a notoriously unreliable way of selecting the best people for the job. This is perhaps unsurprising, when you consider the limited overlap between the skills needed to ace an interview and perform well day to day in a job or on a university course. And how many of us can honestly say we have been 100% truthful in a job interview?

Experimental studies show how unreliable interviewers are at accurately predicting someone’s capabilities. This is borne out on the rare occasions it gets tested in the real world. In the late 1970s, there was a doctor shortage in Texas and politicians instructed the state medical school to increase its admissions, after it had already selected 150 applicants after interview. So it took another 50 candidates who had reached the interview stage and been rejected, even though many of the stronger rejected candidates had already been snapped up by other medical schools. Researchers found these 50 students performed just as well as the original crop. Once the candidates got through the on-paper sift, they might as well have been drawn out of a hat.

Not only are interviews a generally bad way to spot talent, they are terrible at smuggling in bias. There are the obvious implicit biases – sexism, racism, ageism, class discrimination – but others also exist. According to psychologist Ron Friedman, we tend to perceive good-looking people to be more competent, tall candidates as having greater leadership potential and deep-voiced candidates as more trustworthy. Interviews also encourage us to pick people who look like us, think similarly to us and with whom we strike up an easy rapport. The myth of the meritocratic interview allows all sorts of prejudice to flourish.

These days, huge effort goes into trying to unpick these biases in interviews. Vast sums are spent on unconscious bias training, but the evidence as to its effectiveness is mixed at best. It turns out training a person’s subconscious to think differently isn’t as easy as a half-day course.


An element of random selection might engender a bit more humility on the part of white, middle-class men

This is why it is no substitute for breaking down the structures that allow these biases to fester. For example, managers might only be allowed to make an appointment once they have a sufficiently diverse shortlist. I’ve long been a believer in quotas for underrepresented groups where improving diversity is happening at a glacial pace, for example, in Oxbridge admissions.

But a recent conversation with a friend who works at Nesta, a charitable foundation, got me thinking about whether we should ditch the pretence that we can accurately predict people’s potential. Her organisation is experimenting with a lottery to award funding to staff for innovative projects. Employees can put forward their own proposal. All of those that meet a minimum set of criteria go into a draw, with a number selected for funding at random.

My initial thought was that this sounded bonkers. But ponder it more and the logic is sound. Not only does it eliminate human bias, it encourages creativity and avoids groupthink, discouraging staff from self-censoring because they think their idea is one management simply wouldn’t go for. It chimes with those who have argued that at least some science funding should be awarded by lottery, because in the contemporary world of peer review and scoring grids, risky ideas with potentially huge pay-offs do not attract sufficient funding.

Random selection embodies a very different conception of fairness to meritocracy. But if we accept that what we call meritocracy is predominantly a way for advantage to self-replicate, why not at least experiment with lotteries instead? Big graduate recruiters or Oxbridge courses could set “on paper” entry criteria, select candidates who meet them at random and test whether there are any differences with candidates selected by interview.

I am willing to bet that, as observed in Texas, they would do no worse. And that there would be other benefits: diversity of thought as well as diversity of demography. Quotas are often criticised for their potential to undermine those individuals who benefit from positive discrimination; everyone knows they are there not purely on merit, or so the argument goes. An element of random selection might engender a bit more humility on the part of white, middle-class men; it goes alongside being honest that meritocracy is a convenient mask for privilege.

The reason such experiments remain unlikely is that studies show that even when people are aware of the fallibility of interviews, they sustain incredible self-belief in their ability to buck the trend. Not only that, there are a lot of powerful people with a stake in maintaining the illusion of meritocracy. Oxford and Cambridge want to preserve the misconception that their selection procedures embody the creme de la creme of today selecting the creme de la creme of tomorrow.

But if you find yourself balking at random selection, ask yourself this: have you ever formed a first impression that was wrong? It might go against the grain, but making more liberal use of lotteries might produce not just a fairer but a better and more diverse world.

Americans really pay a bribe for a good education? In Britain, we’ve got far subtler ways

The deviousness that some routinely resort to here puts the US scandal in the shade writes Catherine Bennett in The Guardian

‘Emily Thornberry hoovered up three precious places at an outstanding part-selective school.’ Photograph: George Cracknell Wright/Rex/Shutterstock


“Dude, dude, what do you think, I’m a moron?” Thus, one of the parents accused of involvement in the US college bribery racket. He’d been warned – by a wiretapped conspirator – not to reveal that he paid $50,000 for his daughter’s fraudulent test results, part of a system the fixer calls “the side door”.

Appropriately soothed – “I’m not saying you’re a moron” – the accused father is recorded, by the FBI, assuring the scam’s organiser that he’ll deliver, if required, the agreed fiction. “I’m going to say that I’ve been inspired how you’re helping underprivileged kids get into college. Totally got it.”

Although many of the best bits of an FBI affidavit – presenting the case against the accused parents – have been widely circulated, this sublime page-turner deserves to be enjoyed in full, if not put up for literary awards pending film adaptation (Laura Dern has been suggested for Felicity Huffman), and made compulsory reading in all admission departments. It’s not just that extracts can’t convey the fathomless entitlement and mendacity exhibited by affluent, ostensibly respectable parents. They can’t begin to do justice to the affidavit’s entertainment value as savage social comedy, something productions of Molière often attempt, but rarely achieve.

Even the dramatis personae, in the investigation the FBI named “Operation Varsity Blues”, reads like an updated Tartuffe: “Todd Blake is an entrepreneur and investor. Diane Blake is an executive at a retail merchandising firm.” Here, too, cultivated, fluent people, many of whom also sound deluded, greedy and hypocritical, appear to be playing with their children’s lives for no reason beyond self-gratification. But the dialogue, when not jaw-dropping, races along (“And it works?” asks a defendant. “Every time.”), the plots and motives are horribly plausible, and the jeopardy is evidently real to the alleged conspirators, even if the all-encompassing irony of their alleged scheme is not. “She actually won’t really be part of the water polo team, right?”

And from a fellow future defendant, on the risks, if this status-enhancing, child-perfecting scam were to be discovered: “You know, the, the embarrassment to everyone in the communities. Oh my God, it would just be – yeah. Ugh.”

Are FBI affidavits regularly as good as the tale of Operation Varsity Blues? If so, the death of the novel should be easier to bear. Although this document has one overriding purpose – to show that accused parents and witnesses colluded in fraudulent applications – special thanks are due to special agent Laura Smith, the author, who never writes a dull page. Maybe the individual cases were fully as compelling as this edited evidence suggests. Or maybe agent Smith’s organisation of her material really does indicate considerable, dry artistry? Either way, you cherish the detail when an accused parent replies, following an allegedly fraudulently extracted college offer: “This is wonderful news! [high-five emoji].”

  Actress Felicity Huffman has been indicted in the university admissions scandal. Photograph: David McNew/AFP/Getty Images

Ditto Smith’s generous quotation from a statement provided for a girl who has been reinvented, apparently for scam purposes, as a “US Club Soccer All American”: “On the soccer or lacrosse etc I am the one who looks like a boy amongst girls with my hair tied up, arms sleeveless, and blood and bruises from head to toe.”

Not, of course, that’s there’s anything illegal, here or in the US, about reproducing personal statements from professional suppliers or collaborating with a teacher and/or parent – the latter, though risibly unfair, is routine. Another Varsity Blues alleged tactic, that of buying a diagnosis requiring extra exam time, may have no exact UK parallel but, according to a 2017 BBC report, one in five children in independent schools received extra time for GCSE and A-levels. David Kynaston and David Green, in a powerful critique of independent schools, recently pointed out various advantages, made possible by high fees: “Far greater resources are available for diagnosing special needs, challenging exam results and guiding university applications.”

If, mercifully, UK universities are low on dependable side doors, the shamelessness of some of the US defendants, as they appear to pursue their imagined birthright (Ivy League bragging rights) can still sound uncomfortably familiar. Many British parents, equally fearful of mediocrity, are similarly unabashed on local tricks and stratagems – not only private education, but house moves, music lessons (for reserved school places), intensive coaching, internships, resits, religious conversions, fake addresses, and, the Times now reports, FOI requests to Oxbridge, from disappointed parents – that will end up, added to financial and cultural capital, delivering much the same outcome as the US scandal. Legal or otherwise, the result is enhanced educational opportunities for the privileged and untalented, fewer for the talented but disadvantaged.

The pervasive cunning is hardly surprising given the official esteem for “sharp-elbowed” parental operators, who, David Laws once argued, set a fine example. It follows, as demonstrated by UK politicians on all sides, that extreme resourcefulness in, say, keeping places from less fortunate residents, is readily passed off as understandable dedication as opposed to insatiable self-interest. Don’t we all want [smiling face with halo emoji] the best for our kids?

Following some unspecified epiphany, David Cameron, of previously wavering faith, secured places at an oversubscribed church school, some distance from No 10, requiring proof of “Sunday worship in a church at least twice a month for 36 months before the closing applications date”. Equally instructively, my own, affluent MP, Emily Thornberry, had, earlier, hoovered up three of the few precious places at an outstanding, part-selective school in Hertfordshire, 13 miles from home, which tradition annually reserves for her Islington constituents. On Twitter, she has reminded critics: “All my children educated in the state sector.” There is no suggestion that either MP has broken any laws.

There must be, beyond legality, some ethically significant factor that makes non-paying wangling infinitely superior to the ugly, US variety. But you probably have to buy a place at Harvard to find out what it is.

Britain’s private school problem

While many agree that private education is at the root of inequality in Britain, open discussion about the issue remains puzzlingly absent. In their new book, historian David Kynaston and economist Francis Green set out the case for change in The Guardian 


The existence in Britain of a flourishing private-school sector not only limits the life chances of those who attend state schools but also damages society at large, and it should be possible to have a sustained and fully inclusive national conversation about the subject. Whether one has been privately educated, or has sent or is sending one’s children to private schools, or even if one teaches at a private school, there should be no barriers to taking part in that conversation. Everyone has to live – and make their choices – in the world as it is, not as one might wish it to be. That seems an obvious enough proposition. Yet in a name-calling culture, ever ready with the charge of hypocrisy, this reality is all too often ignored. 

For the sake of avoiding misunderstanding, we should state briefly our own backgrounds and choices. One of our fathers was a solicitor in Brighton, the other was an army officer rising to the rank of lieutenant-colonel; we were both privately educated; we both went to Oxford University; our children have all been educated at state grammar schools; in neither case did we move to the areas (Kent and south-west London) because of the existence of those schools; and in recent years we have become increasingly preoccupied with the private-school issue, partly as citizens concerned with Britain’s social and democratic wellbeing, partly as an aspect of our professional work (one as an economist, the other as a historian).

In Britain, private schools – including their fundamental unfairness – remain the elephant in the room. It would be an almost immeasurable benefit if this were no longer the case. Education is different. Its effects are deep, long-term and run from one generation to the next. Those with enough money are free to purchase and enjoy expensive holidays, cars, houses and meals. But education is not just another material asset: it is fundamental to creating who we are.

What particularly defines British private education is its extreme social exclusivity. Only about 6% of the UK’s school population attend such schools, and the families accessing private education are highly concentrated among the affluent. At every rung of the income ladder there are a small number of private-school attenders; but it is only at the very top, above the 95th rung of the ladder – where families have an income of at least £120,000 – that there are appreciable numbers of private-school children. At the 99th rung – families with incomes upwards of £300,000 – six out of every 10 children are at private school. A glance at the annual fees is relevant here. The press focus tends to be on the great and historic boarding schools – such as Eton (basic fee £40,668 in 2018–19), Harrow (£40,050) and Winchester (£39,912) – but it is important to see the private sector in the less glamorous round, and stripped of the extra cost of boarding. In 2018 the average day fees at prep schools were, at £13,026, around half the income of a family on the middle rung of the income ladder. For secondary school, and even more so sixth forms, the fees are appreciably higher. In short, access to private schooling is, for the most part, available only to wealthy households. Indeed, the small number of income-poor families going private can only do so through other sources: typically, grandparents’ assets and/or endowment-supported bursaries from some of the richest schools. Overwhelmingly, pupils at private schools are rubbing shoulders with those from similarly well-off backgrounds.
They arrange things somewhat differently elsewhere: among affluent countries, Britain’s private‑school participation is especially exclusive to the rich. In Germany, for instance, it is also low, but unlike in Britain is generously state-funded, more strongly regulated and comes with modest fees. In France, private schools are mainly Catholic schools permitted to teach religion: the state pays the teachers and the fees are very low. In the US there is a very small sector of non-sectarian private schools with high fees, but most private schools are, again, religious, with much lower fees than here. Britain’s private-school configuration is, in short, distinctive.

 

Some of the public figures of the past 20 years to have attended private schools (l-r from top): Tony Blair, former Bank of England governor Eddie George, Princess Diana, Prince Charles, Charles Spencer, businesswoman Martha Lane Fox, Dominic West, James Blunt, former Northern Rock chairman Matt Ridley, Boris Johnson, David Cameron, George Osborne, Jeremy Paxman, fashion journalist Alexandra Shulman, footballer Frank Lampard, Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn and cricketer Joe Root. Composite: Rex, Getty

And so what, accordingly, does Britain look like in the 21st century? A brief but expensive history, 1997–2018, offers some guide. As the millennium approaches, New Labour under Tony Blair (Fettes) sweeps to power. The Bank of England under Eddie George (Dulwich) gets independence. The chronicles of Hogwarts school begin. A nation grieves for Diana (West Heath); Charles (Gordonstoun) retrieves her body; her brother (Eton) tells it as it is. Martha Lane Fox (Oxford High) blows a dotcom bubble. Charlie Falconer (Glenalmond) masterminds the Millennium Dome. Will Young (Wellington) becomes the first Pop Idol. The Wire’s Jimmy McNulty (Eton) sorts out Baltimore. James Blunt (Harrow) releases the bestselling album of the decade. Northern Rock collapses under the chairmanship of Matt Ridley (Eton). Boris Johnson (Eton) enters City Hall in London. The Cameron-Osborne (Eton-St Paul’s) axis takes over the country; Nick Clegg (Westminster) runs errands. Life staggers on in austerity Britain mark two. Jeremy Clarkson (Repton) can’t stop revving up; Jeremy Paxman (Malvern) still has an attitude problem; Alexandra Shulman (St Paul’s Girls) dictates fashion; Paul Dacre (University College School) makes middle England ever more Mail-centric; Alan Rusbridger (Cranleigh) makes non-middle England ever more Guardian-centric; judge Brian Leveson (Liverpool College) fails to nail the press barons; Justin Welby (Eton) becomes top mitre man; Frank Lampard (Brentwood) becomes a Chelsea legend; Joe Root (Worksop) takes guard; Henry Blofeld (Eton) spots a passing bus. The Cameron-Osborne axis sees off Labour, but not Boris Johnson+Nigel Farage (Dulwich)+Arron Banks (Crookham Court). Ed Balls (Nottingham High) takes to the dance floor. Theresa May (St Juliana’s) and Jeremy Corbyn (Castle House prep school) face off. Prince George (Thomas’s Battersea) and Princess Charlotte (Willcocks) start school.

The statistics also tell a story. The proportion of prominent people in every area who have been educated privately is striking, in some cases grotesque. From judges (74% privately educated) through to MPs (32%), the numbers tell us of a society where bought educational privilege also buys lifetime privilege and influence. “The dogged persistence of the British ‘old boy”’ is how a 2017 study describes the traditional dominance of private-school alumni in British society. This reveals the fruits of exploring well over a century of biographical data in Who’s Who, that indispensable annual guide to the composition of the British elite. For those born between the 1830s and 1920s, roughly 50-60% went to private schools; for those born between the 1930s and 1960s, the proportion was roughly 45-50%. Among the new entrants to Who’s Who in the 21st century, the proportion of the privately educated has remained constant at around 45%. Going to one of the schools in the prestigious Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC) still gives a 35 times better chance of entering Who’s Who than if one has not attended an HMC school; while those attending the historic crème de la crème, the so-called Clarendon Schools (Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Merchant Taylors’, Rugby, St Paul’s, Shrewsbury, Westminster, Winchester), are 94 times more likely to join the elite than any ordinary British-educated person.

Even if one’s child never achieves celebrity, sending him or her to a private school is usually a shrewd investment – indeed, increasingly so, to judge by the relevant longitudinal studies of two different generations. Take first the cohort born in 1958: in terms of those with comparable social backgrounds, demographic characteristics and early tested skills, and different only in what type of school they attended when they were 11, by the time they were in their early 30s (around 1990) the privately educated were earning 7% more than the state-educated. Compare that with those born in 1970: by the same stage (the early 2000s), the gap between the two categories – again, similar in all other respects – had risen to 21% in favour of the privately educated.

The only realistic starting point for an analysis lies with the assertion that, in the modern era, most of these schools are of high quality, offering a good educational environment. They deploy very substantial resources; respect the need for a disciplined environment for learning; and give copious attention to generating a positive and therefore motivating experience. This argument – the resources point aside – is not an altogether easy one for the left to accept, against a background of it having historically been undecided whether (in the words of one Labour education minister’s senior civil servant in the 1960s) “these schools are so bloody they ought to be abolished, or so marvellous they ought to be made available to everyone”. We do not necessarily accept that all private schools are “marvellous”; but by and large we recognise that, in their own terms of fulfilling what their customers demand, they deliver the goods.

Above all, private schools succeed when it comes to preparing their pupils for public exams – the gateways to universities. In 2018 the proportion of private-school students achieving A*s and As at A-level was 48%, compared with a national average of 26%; while for GCSEs, in terms of achieving an A or grade seven or above, the respective figures were 63% and 23%. At both stages, GCSE and A-level, the gap is invariably huge.

A famous image of school privilege: Harrovians Peter Wagner and Thomas Dyson and local schoolboys George Salmon, Jack Catlin and George Young photographed outside Lord’s cricket ground in 1937 by Jimmy Sime. Photograph: Jimmy Sime/Allsport

There are, of course, some very real contextual factors to these bald and striking figures. Any study must take account of where the children are coming from. Nevertheless, the picture presented by several studies is one of relatively small but still significant effects at every stage of education; and over the course of a school career, the cumulative effects build up to a notable gain in academic achievements.

Yet academic learning and exam results are not all there is to a quality education, and indeed there is more on offer from private schools. At Harrow, for example, its vision is that the school “prepares boys… for a life of learning, leadership, service and personal fulfilment”. It offers “a wide range of high-level extracurricular activities, through which boys discover latent talent, develop individual character and gain skills in leadership and teamwork”. Lesser-known schools trumpet something similar. Cumbria’s Austin Friars, for example, highlights a well-rounded education, proclaiming that its alumni will be “creative problem-solvers… effective communicators… and confident, modest and articulate members of society who embody the Augustinian values of unity, truth and love...”

If, on the whole, Britain’s private schools provide a quality education in both academic and broader terms, how do they deliver that? Four areas stand out.

First, especially small class sizes are a major boon for pupils and teachers alike. Second, the range of extracurricular activities and the intensive cultivation of “character” and “confidence” are important. Third, the high – and therefore exclusive – price tag sustains a peer group of children mainly drawn from supportive and affluent families. And fourth, to achieve the best possible exam results and the highest rate of admission to the top universities, “working the system” comes into play. Far greater resources are available for diagnosing special needs, challenging exam results and guiding university applications. Underpinning all these areas of advantage are the high revenues from fees: Britain’s private schools can deploy resources whose order of magnitude for each child is approximately three times what is available at the average state school.

The relevant figures for university admissions are thus almost entirely predictable. Perhaps inevitably, by far the highest-profile stats concern Oxbridge, where between 2010 and 2015 an average of 43% of offers from Oxford and 37% from Cambridge were made to privately educated students, and there has been no sign since of any significant opening up. Top schools, top universities: the pattern of privilege is systemic, and not just confined to the dreaming spires. Going to a top university, it hardly needs adding, signals a material difference, especially in Britain where universities are quite severely ranked in a hierarchy.
Ultimately, does any of this matter? Why can one not simply accept that these are high-quality schools that provide our future leaders with a high-quality education? Given the thorniness – and often invidiousness – of the issue, it is a tempting proposition. Yet for a mixture of reasons – political and economic, as well as social – we believe that the issue represents in contemporary Britain an unignorable problem that urgently needs to be addressed and, if possible, resolved. The words of Alan Bennett reverberate still. Private education is not fair, he famously declared in June 2014 during a sermon at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge. “Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it, or should.”

Consider these three fundamental facts: one in every 16 pupils goes to a private school; one in every seven teachers works at a private school; one pound in every six of all school expenditure in England is for the benefit of private-school pupils.

The crucial point to make here is that although extra resources for each school (whether private or state) are always valuable, that value is at a diminishing rate the wealthier the school is. Each extra teacher or assistant helps, but if you already have two assistants in a class, a third one adds less value than the second. Given the very unequal distribution of academic resources entailed by the British private school system, it is unarguable that a more egalitarian distribution of the same resources would enhance the total educational achievement. There is, moreover, the sheer extravagance. Multiple theatres, large swimming pools and beautiful surroundings with expensive upkeep are, of course, nice to have and look suitably seductive on sales brochures – but add relatively little educational value.

Further inefficiency arises from education’s “positional” aspect. The resources lift up children in areas where their rank position on the ladder of success matters, such as access to scarce places at top universities. To the considerable extent this happens, the privately educated child benefits but the state-educated child loses out. This lethal combination of private benefit and public waste is nowhere more apparent than in the time and effort that private schools devote to working the system, to ease access to those scarce places.

What about the implications for our polity? The way the privately educated have sustained semi-monopolistic positions of prominence and influence in the modern era has created a serious democratic deficit. The unavoidable truth is that, by and large, the increasingly privileged and entitled products of an elite private education have – almost inevitably – only a limited and partial understanding of, and empathy with, the realities of everyday life as lived by most people. One of those realities is, of course, state education. It marked some kind of apotheosis when in July 2014 the appointment of Nicky Morgan (Surbiton High) as education secretary meant that every minister in her department at that time was privately educated.

On social mobility, there has been in recent years an abundance of apparently sincere, well-meaning rhetoric, not least from our leading politicians. “Britain has the lowest social mobility in the developed world,” laments David Cameron in 2015. “Here, the salary you earn is more linked to what your father got paid than in any other major country. We cannot accept that.” In 2016 Jeremy Corbyn declares his movement will “ensure every young person has the opportunities to maximise their talents”, while Theresa May follows on: “I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit not privilege; where it’s your talent and hard work that matter, not where you were born, who your parents are or what your accent sounds like.” Rather like corporate social responsibility in the business world, social mobility has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie causes that it is almost rude not to utter warm words about.

Yet the mismatch between such sentiments and policymakers’ practical intentions is palpable. The Social Mobility Commission, with cross-party representation, reported regularly on what government should do, but in December 2017 all sitting members resigned in frustration at the lack of policy action in response to their recommendations.

The underlying reality of our private-school problem is stark. Through a highly resourced combination of social exclusiveness and academic excellence, the private-school system has in our lifetimes powered an enduring cycle of privilege. It is hard to imagine a notable improvement in our social mobility while private schooling continues to play such an important role. Allowing, as Britain still does, an unfettered expenditure on high-quality education for only a small minority of the population condemns our society in seeming perpetuity to a damaging degree of social segregation and inequality. This hands-off approach to private schools has come to matter ever more, given over the past half-century the vastly increased importance in our society of educational credentials. Perhaps once it might have been conceivable to argue that private education was a symptom rather than a cause of how privilege in Britain was transferred from one generation to the next, but that day is long gone: the centrality of schooling in both social and economic life – and the Noah’s flood of resources channelled into private schools for the few – are seemingly permanent features of the modern era. The reproduction of privilege is now tied in inextricably with the way we organise our formal education.
Ineluctably, as we look ahead, the question of fairness returns. If private schooling in Britain remains fundamentally unreconstructed, it will remain predominantly intended and destined for the advantage of the already privileged children who attend.

We need to talk openly about this problem, and it is time to find some answers. Some call for the “abolition” of private schools – whatever that might mean. We do not call for that, because we think it is better – and feasible – to harness for all the good qualities of private schools. Feasible reforms are available; these do not require excessive commitments from the Treasury, but do require a political commitment.

We are, however, under no illusions about the task of reform. The schools’ links with powerful vested interests are close and continuous. London’s main clubs (dominated by privately educated men) would be one example; the Church of England (closely connected with many private schools, from Westminster downwards) would be another. Or take the City of London, where in that historic and massively wealthy square mile not only do individual livery companies have an intimate involvement with a range of private schools, but the City corporation itself supports an elite trio in Surrey and London (City of London, City of London school for girls, City of London Freemen’s school). While as for the many hundreds of individual links between “top people” and private schools, often in the form of sitting on governing bodies, it only needs a glance at Who’s Who to get the gist. The term “the establishment” can be a tiresome one, too often loosely and inaccurately used, but in the sense of complementary networks of people at or close to the centres of power and wealth, it actually does mean something.

All of which leaves the private schools almost uniquely well placed to make their case and protect their corner. They have ready access to prominent public voices speaking on their behalf, especially in the House of Lords; they enjoy the passive support of the Church of England, which is distinctly reluctant to draw attention to the moral gulf between the aims of ancient founders and the socioeconomic realities of the present; and of course, they have no qualms about utilising all possible firepower, human as well as media and institutional, to block anything they find threatening.

The great historian EP Thompson wrote more than half a century ago about The Peculiarities of the English. Historically, those peculiarities have been various, but the most important – and pervasive in its consequences – has been social class. Of course, things to a degree have changed since Thompson’s time. The visible distinctions of dress and speech have been somewhat eroded, if far from obliterated; the obvious social manifestations of a manufacturing economy have been replaced by the more fluid forms of a service economy; the increasing emphasis of reformers and activists has been on issues of gender and ethnicity; and a series of politicians and others have sought to assure us that we are moving into “a classless society”. Yet the fundamental social reality remains profoundly and obstinately otherwise. Britain is still a place where more often than not it matters crucially not only to whom one has been born, but where and in what circumstances one has grown up.

It would be manifestly absurd to pin the blame entirely on the existence over the past few centuries of a flourishing private-school sector. Even so, given that these schools have been and still are places that – when the feelgood verbiage is stripped away – ensure that their already advantaged pupils retain and extend their socio‑economic advantages in later life, common sense places them squarely in the centre of the frame.

Is it possible in Britain over the next 10 or 20 years to build a sufficiently widespread consensus for reform? Or, at the very least, to begin to have a serious, sustained, non-name-calling, non-guilt-ridden national conversation on the subject of private education? A poll we commissioned from Populus shows a virtually landslide majority for a perception of unfairness about private education, indicating that public opinion is potentially receptive to grappling with the issue and what to do about it. The poll reveals, moreover, that even those who have been privately educated, or have chosen to educate their own children privately, are more likely than not to have a perception of unfairness.

The question of what to do about a sector educating only some 6% of our school population might seem relatively trifling, and difficult to prioritise (especially in challenging economic circumstances), compared with say the challenges of quality teacher recruitment across the state sector or the whole vital area of early-years learning. Yet it would be a huge mistake to underestimate the seriously negative educational aspects of the current dispensation and to continue to marginalise the private-school question. The private schools’ reach is very much broader than their minority share of school pupils implies. Unless some radical reform is set in train, an unreconstructed private-school system, with its enormous resource superiority and exclusiveness hanging over the state system as a beacon for unequal treatment and privilege, would make it hard to sustain a fully comprehensive and fair state education system.

Ultimately, the issue is at least as much about what kind of society one might hope the Britain of the 2020s and 2030s to be. A more open society in which upward social mobility starts to become a real possibility for many children, not just a few lucky ones? A society in which the affluent are not educated in enclaves, and in which schooling for the affluent is not funded at something like three times the level of schooling for the less affluent? A society in which the pursuit through education of greater equality of life chances, seeking to harness the talents of all our children, is a matter of real and rigorous intent? A society in which there is a just relationship between the competing demands of liberty and equity, and in which we are, to coin a phrase, all in it together? For the building of such a society, or anything even remotely close, the issue of private education is pivotal, both symbolically and substantively. The reform of private schools will not alone be sufficient to achieve a good education system for all, let alone the good society; but it surely is a necessary condition. At this particular moment in our island story, the future seems peculiarly a blank sheet. Everything is potentially on the table. And for once, that has to include the engines of privilege. For if not now, when?

• Engines of Privilege: Britain’s Private School Problem by Francis Green and David Kynaston is published by Bloomsbury on 7 February (£20). To order a copy for £17.60 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99

How to do it: feasible reform options

There are broadly two types of option: those that handicap private schools, making them less attractive to parents, and those that envisage “crossing the tracks” – some form of integration with the state-school sector. Some reforms would have much more of an impact than others.

1. Handicaps

Contextual admissions to universities Where universities, especially the high-status ones, make substantial allowances for candidates’ school background; alternatively, as another method of positive discrimination, some form of a quota system.

Upping the cost Where the fees are substantially raised, making some parents switch away from the private-school sector and opt for state schools. Even though tax subsidies are not huge, the government could reduce them, for example by taking away charitable status (from those schools that are charities) or by requiring that all schools pay business rates in full (as in Scotland from 2020).

Alternatively, something that would “hurt” a bit more, government could directly tax school fees (as in Labour’s manifesto pledge to impose VAT or in Andrew Adonis’s proposed 25% “educational opportunity tax”).

2. Crossing the tracks

There are several proposed schemes for enabling children from low-income families to attend private schools. Mainly, these would leave it to schools to choose how they select their pupils. Some are relatively small in scope, including a proposal from the Independent Schools Council that would involve no more than 2% of the private-school population. Others are more ambitious: the Sutton Trust’s Open Access Scheme proposes that all places at about 80 top private secondary day schools would be competed for on academic merit. The government would subsidise those who could not afford the fees.

In another type of partial integration, schools would select a proportion of state-funded pupils according to the Schools Admissions Code, meaning that the government or local government would set the principles for selection and the extra places would become an extension to the state system. We suggest a Fair Access Scheme, where the schools would be obliged initially to recruit one-third of their pupils in this way, with a view to the proportion rising significantly over time.

Oxford and Cambridge condemned over failure to improve state school access

Hard-hitting report by Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission takes elite colleges to task.

 

Christ Church College, Oxford, is among those that offered fewer than 50% of places to pupils from state school. Photograph: Alamy


Daniel Boffey in The Guardian


The universities of Oxford and Cambridge are facing an unprecedented attack from government advisers for their failure to increase the number of state school pupils studying at Oxbridge colleges.

The elite institutions’ records will be criticised and individual colleges named and shamed in a hard-hitting annual report by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission.

The failure of some major Oxbridge colleges to accept even half of their intake from state schools will be criticised in the strongest terms by the public body, the Observer has learned. The commission will say on Thursday that while attainment of top A-level grades by those from the least wealthy backgrounds is poor, with just 2.2% of the most deprived gaining good grades, these statistics offer no excuse for Oxbridge’s intake figures.

Oxbridge colleges named and shamed for failing to admit poorer students



Written by the former Labour cabinet minister Alan Milburn and former Tory cabinet minister Gillian Shephard, his deputy on the commission, the report is expected to say that:

■ Despite an increase of 6% in the proportion of state-educated pupils between 2003-04 and 2013-14, independently schooled pupils still make up around two-fifths of the intake at both Oxford and Cambridge.

■ To meet their benchmarks for disadvantaged pupils, Oxford would need to increase the percentage of state school pupils by a quarter (24%) and Cambridge by a fifth (18%).

■ Large discrepancies between Oxbridge colleges in the number of offers to made to applicants from the state sector illustrate that many should be doing much more.

■ Some colleges make less than half of their offers to state-educated pupils. The worst performers are University College (Oxford), Robinson (Cambridge), St Peter’s (Oxford), Trinity (Oxford) and Christ Church (Oxford).

■ Even the best performers in this regard still give a quarter or more of their places to the privately educated. The Observer understands that the commission will welcome Oxbridge’s increasing use of contextual measures as a means of addressing the under-representation of lower-income and state-educated students, but demand greater and better use of it.

Three years ago the appointment of the then vice-chancellor of Bedfordshire university, Professor Les Ebdon, to head the Office for Fair Access (Offa), was nearly blocked over his championing of contextual information when offering places. Michael Gove, then education secretary, reportedly lobbied at the time that Ebdon was an advocate of social engineering rather than excellence in universities.

However, the commission will dismiss those concerns. A source said it believed that “too often in the past, university applicants have missed out because of a lack of opportunity to demonstrate their potential”.

They will provide statistics to show that poor children who are high-attaining at 11 are four times less likely to go on to an elite university than their high-attaining wealthier peers.
The source added: “It is right that where a young person has attended a poor-performing secondary school, is a care leaver or comes from an area with stubbornly low higher education participation, their predicted and actual grades should be considered in that light. The commission will call for this practice to be encouraged and continued.”

While using contextual data to judge between pupils with top grades, Oxbridge colleges have resisted reducing their A-level demands, claiming that they wish to retain their reputation for excellence.

However, under a “Realising Opportunities” scheme involving 16 universities including Bristol, UCL, Exeter, Warwick and York, tutors are allowed to give offers which are two grades below course entry requirements.

The eligibility criteria include evidence that the pupil lives in a neighbourhood which has a low progression rate to higher education or an area which has a high level of financial, social or economic deprivation; comes from a home where neither parent attended university in the UK or abroad; is in receipt of or entitled to discretionary payments; is in receipt of or entitled to free school meals.

Earlier this year Offa prompted an angry reaction from some of the country’s top institutions when it called for a doubling of admissions of teenagers from poor families over the next five years. In 2011, 22,000 teenagers (20%) from the poorest fifth of school-leavers, went to university. Offa wants that to increase to 40,000.

Damien Shannon, who sued St Hugh’s College, Oxford, in 2013 when, despite winning a postgraduate place on academic merit, he was told that without £12,900 to fund living costs he would not be welcome, applauded the commission’s intentions.

The son of a single mother from a council estate in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, Shannon said he had only applied to Oxford after a chance meeting with a professor who said he was “quite bright and should have a go”. Shannon decided to represent himself in a legal action against the college’s extremely expensive and hostile barristers on the grounds that it was discriminating against poor pupils.

Despite initially appearing to take a hard line, the college put up the white flag and settled out of court. It gave him his place and it reviewed and reformed its policies. Shannon is now a high-flying civil servant.

Shannon, who did his first degree at Salford university and the Open university, said: “I loved my time at St Hugh’s and I go back all the time now. But studying there as an undergraduate would not have occurred to me in a million years, no more than living in Buckingham Palace.”

Looking down the list of the worst-performing Oxbridge colleges, Shannon said he could also also see a trend. “The decision on admissions is made by the colleges and not the faculty for undergraduates,” he said. “I have always thought that was a mistake. I don’t know how a college can divorce an academic decision from the knowledge that a candidate who comes with resources may be more useful for the college in the future.

“I do not think it is any coincidence that the richest colleges are the ones who seem minded to accept the richest applicants.”

Shannon, 29, who now gives talks to pupils at Paddington Academy in London on attaining a place at Oxbridge, added: “Contextual data is not a new idea it has just gone out of vogue. A man called David Miliband, who went on to be foreign secretary, received a place at Oxford University on the basis of contextual data.

“If it was a good idea 30 years ago, it is a good idea today. If it was right for David Miliband, then I don’t see why it wouldn’t be right for the children from poorer backgrounds today.

Don’t sneer at redbrick revolutionaries – some of our best leaders were terrible students

Owen Jones in The Guardian

It is the season for academic snobbery, apparently. Labour was once the “clever party”, bemoaned Harry Mount in the Spectator recently, but now it’s had a “brain transplant. It’s out with the Oxbridge and Harvard graduates with first class degrees; in with the redbrick university graduates”. The horror. Martin Amis concurs, slamming Jeremy Corbyn for being “undereducated”. And now Tristram Hunt is at it, referring to Cambridge University students lazily but revealingly as the “top 1%” who had a “responsibility to take leadership going forward”.

Labour risks turning into a sect, says Tristram Hunt



A disclaimer: I am, myself, an Oxbridge graduate, like so many who write on these pages. I’m not ashamed of making the jump from comprehensive schools to Oxford either (although I am no working class hero): if Oxbridge drew more students from non-selective comprehensives, the status quo would be less objectionable. But the comments betray a depressing lack of insight into supposed academic success and its relevance in the world of politics.

First off, Oxbridge does not mean the best. Knowing lots of things and being clever are not the same thing. Yes, Oxbridge is supposed to be about more than stuffing the heads of students full of knowledge – it’s about encouraging critical thinking and the like. But while I met some incredibly bright people at Oxford, I also met others who were certainly not clever at all; similarly, I’ve met people who never attended university who are supremely clever.

Unless you are a social Darwinian who believes the richest are the brightest, in no sense can Oxbridge be described as an academic elite. More than 43% of Oxford students went to a private school, as did 7% of the rest of the population; many of its state school students went to grammars, and a terrifyingly small 11% of Oxbridge students are working class by origin.

We all like to imagine our achievements are down to our own individual ability, and suggestions to the contrary normally provoke defensive and insecure reactions. But the backgrounds of Mount, Amis and Hunt go a long way to explain their successes. Westminster school-educated, ex-Bullingdon Club member Mount is the son of Sir Ferdinand Mount, Margaret Thatcher’s former head of policy. Amis (whose best friend, Christopher Hitchens, was awarded a third-class degree in PPE at Oxford) is the son of literary giant Sir Kingsley Amis, and Hunt is the University College School-educated son of Lord Hunt. Would they have racked up their achievements without their privileged background? It is possible. But very unlikely.

Academic success is disproportionately the preserve of those from privileged backgrounds for many reasons: among them, being exposed to broader vocabularies from an earlier age; the quality of housing; diet; the potential stresses of poverty, and so on. And to rebut the inevitable calls for the reintroduction of secondary moderns, the evidence shows worse outcomes for poorer children in areas that still select by supposed ability. Oxford and Cambridge go to great lengths to improve their access, but the truth is many bright working class students don’t apply because they feel the institutions are culturally alien. The Oxbridge colleges should surely enrol the brightest working class and state school students without interview if they aspire to a full representation of the brightest. Privileged people, who disproportionately attend Oxbridge, go on to dominate the professions for other reasons, such as unpaid internships being a gateway to, say, media, politics and law; or postgraduate qualifications that are affordable if you have parents with deep pockets.

In any case, succeeding at a university is no automatic guarantee of being an effective politician. What we need are politicians with an understanding of the problems confronted by millions of people, and a creative imagination that allows them to conjure up appropriate solutions. Winston Churchill was notoriously poor at school, though it seems his political career turned out OK in the end.

The postwar Labour government may have been led by the public school educated Clement Attlee, but look at his ministers. Nye Bevan was the son of a miner; after languishing near the bottom of the class, he began working down the pit almost as soon as he became a teenager. But the conditions he grew up in informed his politics, and he went on to found one of our greatest institutions, the National Health Service. Herbert Morrison was a linchpin of the government, born to a police constable at a time when they were paid derisory wages. Ernest Bevin was born to an impoverished family in Somerset, and went on to become foreign secretary.

I am no fan of John Major, but it is worth noting that under this non-graduate, the Tories chalked up 41.9% of the vote in 1992, trouncing the 36.9% won under the stewardship of Old Etonian David Cameron in May.

If academic success were a guide to political achievement then President George W Bush’s administration would have been a triumph. It was, after all, stuffed full of alumni of Princeton University, Yale University, Harvard Business School (like Bush himself), Harvard University and Notre Dame. Alas, his turned into the most disastrous presidency since the second world war, bequeathing us the calamity of the Iraq war and financial meltdown.

What we need is not politicians who flourish at university coursework and exams, but those who have powers of empathy and imagination. Hailing from a privileged background does not mean you are unable to understand the lives of those less advantaged than you. But when parliament is so white, so male, and where around two-thirds of MPs are from middle class professional backgrounds, inevitable questions have to be raised about our “representative” democracy. Having more female MPs means the issues affecting women are more likely to be addressed, and the same goes for, say, those trapped on social housing waiting lists, lacking secure work, or indeed those who are having their tax credits cut.

Education is so much more than what is learned in lecture rooms and libraries. Political disillusionment and cynicism are complex beasts and they have been stirred for many reasons, but one factor is surely that parliament does not much look like the country it exists to serve. “Oxbridgeocracy”, and those who agitate for it, are sources of sustenance for Ukip and other rightwing populist forces. Sure, there is a place for Oxbridge alumni, but we need far more balance – including from the redbrick universities that so scandalise Mount, and those who haven’t been to university in the first place. Oxbridge isn’t everything. Trust me – I know.

Closed shop at the top in deeply elitist Britain, says study

Elitism so embedded in Britain that it could be called social engineering, social mobility commission concludes

• Andrew Sparrow, political correspondent
• The Guardian, Thursday 28 August 2014

Eton College. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/Getty Images

Britain is "deeply elitist" because people educated at public school and Oxbridge have in effect created a "closed shop at the top", according to a government report published on Thursday.

The Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission said its study of the social background of those "running Britain" was the most detailed of its kind ever undertaken and showed that elitism was so embedded in Britain "that it could be called 'social engineering'".

Alan Milburn, the Labour former cabinet minister who chairs the commission, said that, as well as being unfair, this situation was unacceptable because "locking out a diversity of talents and experiences makes Britain's leading institutions less informed, less representative and, ultimately, less credible than they should be".

The commission's 76-page report mostly focuses on analysis, but it does include recommendations, saying government, schools, universities, employers and even parents all need to play their part in promoting social diversity.

Looking at the background of more than 4,000 people filling jobs at the top of government, the civil service, the judiciary, the media, business and the creative industries, the commission investigated where they went to school, on the grounds that going to a private school is reasonably indicative of a wealthy background.

Only 7% of members of the public attended a private school. But 71% of senior judges, 62% of senior officers in the armed forces, 55% of permanent secretaries in Whitehall, 53% of senior diplomats, 50% of members of the House of Lords and 45% of public body chairs did so.

So too did 44% of people on the Sunday Times Rich List, 43% of newspaper columnists, 36% of cabinet ministers, 33% of MPs, 26% of BBC executives and 22% of shadow cabinet ministers.

Oxbridge graduates also have a stranglehold on top jobs. They comprise less than 1% of the public as a whole, but 75% of senior judges, 59% of cabinet ministers, 57% of permanent secretaries, 50% of diplomats, 47% of newspaper columnists, 44% of public body chairs, 38% of members of the House of Lords, 33% of BBC executives, 33% of shadow cabinet ministers, 24% of MPs and 12% of those on the Sunday Times Rich List.

The report says the judiciary is the most privileged professional group. About 14% of judges attended one of just five independent schools (Eton, Westminster, Radley, Charterhouse and St Paul's Boys).

And senior armed forces officers are the second most exclusive group, the report says. Some 62% of them went to a private school, and only 7% attended a comprehensive.

Milburn said that having such little diversity at the top of society was "not a recipe for a healthy democratic society".

He explained: "Where institutions rely on too narrow a range of people from too narrow a range of backgrounds with too narrow a range of experiences, they risk behaving in ways and focusing on issues that are of salience only to a minority but not the majority in society."

Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary, said the report showed the coalition was failing on social mobility. "Under the Tories, the attainment gap between disadvantaged children and the rest is increasing, millions of hardworking people are seeing their living standards go backwards and child poverty is set to increase," he said.