Don’t scapegoat a private education

There is an insidious, wrongheaded class war being waged – and, bizarrely, it has the endorsement of the Conservative Party. In pursuit of diversity and inclusion, the Government has written questions for the civil service and other employers to ask staff about their backgrounds, including the qualifications and occupations of their parents, the type of school they attended, and whether or not they received free school meals. In its fight against discrimination, the Government is accused of encouraging something that sounds a lot like discrimination.

The UK may well have a social mobility problem, but targeting those who went to independent school, have educated parents or simply weren’t classed as poor when growing up is absurd.

Private education is often a driver of social mobility. Not every pupil is the child of a billionaire. Middle-class parents work and save hard so that their children can enjoy an opportunity they never had, and many schools offer bursaries to those who could otherwise not afford to get in. It would be a prejudice to assume an employee who was privately educated was aristocratic, just as it would be to assume a comprehensive education indicated poverty. Many state schools practise selection, by postcode or otherwise, with parents spending money on housing and tuition to ensure their children get a place. As with independent education, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Socialists see a school doing well and want to level it down: they are driven by the politics of envy. It is far better to ask: “What is an institution getting right and how can we learn from it?” Successful state schools have been imitating their independent competitors for some time: uniforms, competitive sports, an institutional ethos, discipline and internal streaming. The Tories are to be congratulated for promoting this, and yet whenever they take a brave step forward towards meritocracy, they lose their courage and inch back towards egalitarianism.

What is the endgame of asking employees about their class background? There is reassurance that this information could “never form the basis of individual recruitment decisions”, but logic dictates that if politicians decide there is a “problem”, state interference is not far behind. This is not a road a Conservative Government should be travelling.