Old School
7% of the UK population are privately educated. That hasn’t changed for decades, but will it now?
Since the assembling of Keir Starmer’s new cabinet (done in record time - his dad was a toolmaker, you know) you may have seen a chart from the Sutton Trust circulate in the papers and on social media.
It shows the proportion of the cabinet who are privately educated.
The new Labour cabinet are the least privately educated cabinet in history – just 4% attended fee paying schools.
That 4% equates to one person, the new Transport Secretary, Louise Haigh. There’s some nuance around the numbers: Sutton Trust’s analysis reveals that both Hilary Benn (Northern Ireland Secretary) and John Healey (Defence) spent some time in private education, and Starmer himself went to a selective grammar school. Everyone else went to a comprehensive.
Although a historic low, it’s unlikely that this new, largely comprehensively educated cabinet are a mark of what’s to come in the future. Labour governments are always more state-educated than Conservative ones (with the honourable exception of Theresa May’s cabinet, which at the time was the most state-educated since Atlee in 1945).
But it is significant, as for the first time the proportion of our most senior lawmakers that attended a fee-paying school is broadly in line with the rest of the country. That’s a figure that hasn’t changed for decades – to the extent that ‘7% of the country are privately educated’ is one of those non-phantom statistics that everyone seems to know.
The very dull chart below looks at the proportion of children in the UK who attend private schools over time. This has consistently been 7%. It was 7% in 2000 and 7% a decade later. Right now, the number of kids in private school has never been higher – over 600,000 – but there’s also more children in the country, so it’s still 7%.
What does this mean?
As befits a Slow Futures trend, it’s one that isn’t changing at all. It may change a little in the future; Labour’s planned levying of VAT on private school fees has led to some concern in affluent circles that a sharp rise in costs would make private education unaffordable for some or all of their children.
In the introduction to the latest Independent Schools Council Census, there is no shortage of handwringing about the VAT policy. But the Institute for Fiscal Studies has modelled the reduction in private school pupil numbers as a result of the policy to be about 20,000 over a period of time. That would have the effect of changing the proportion of pupils who attend independent schools from 7% to… 7%. This trend is unlikely to change in the future.
The bigger change is likely to be a renewed focus on educational inequality and elitism. The small proportion of the cabinet that are privately educated – and the presence of a Deputy Prime Minister that didn’t go to university – aren’t policy setting forces in their own right. They might mean a greater empathy with and knowledge of the experiences of ordinary people, but largely the statistic revealed by the Sutton Trust is a symbolic one. A consequence of that symbolism might be to train focus on education representativeness in other sectors and organisations.
Another Sutton Trust report, from 2019, reveals the extraordinary dominance of this 7% in leading positions. At that time…
More than half of… members of the house of lords, junior ministers, civil service permanent secretaries, diplomats, senior judges
More than a third of… men’s rugby team, men’s and women’s cricket teams, public body chairs, FTSE350 chairs
More than a quarter of… FTSE350 CEOs, BBC Executives, Public Body CEOs, Olympic medallists
…went to independent schools.
Just like the 7% figure, that kind of imbalance isn’t going to change quickly. In fact, the cabinet, following an election, is the only place where it can change quickly. What we are likely to see – advanced, no doubt, by organisations like the Sutton Trust, or the 93% Club – is the educational background of the cabinet used as a relentless comparator to those organisations, executives and bodies that aren’t quite as reflective of the UK population as the frontbench.
For that reason, we can expect to see social mobility and economic opportunity be more prominent causes - advanced inside and outside of government, in the public and third sector - over the lifetime of this parliament.
More than this
The Labour landslide brings a degree of predictability to politics for the foreseeable future. Politics is likely to move at the kind of pace that Slow Futures likes – but not everything will.
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