A war on privilege

What school did you attend? What postal code did you grow up in? What were your parents’ professions? Those are the questions which Cabinet Office minister Matt Hancock wants companies to start asking job applicants, said Dan Carrier in The Guardian, and which the civil service may soon have to ask. It’s part of a bid to stop discrimination against the poor. “Social justice is at the heart of everything this one-nation Government is trying to achieve,” Hancock explained. You can see what prompted him, said Brendan Cole in the International Business Times. A report from the Sutton Trust, which campaigns for social mobility, has found that half the Cabinet were privately educated, as were 74% of High Court judges; 71% of top military officers; 61% of senior doctors; 51% of leading print journalists; and 42% of Bafta winners. Yet just 7% of the population attended fee-paying schools.

And one of them was Matt Hancock, said Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. He went to The King’s School, Chester (established by Henry VIII in 1541) and from there to Exeter College, Oxford. Like his mentor George Osborne (St Paul’s; Magdalen College, Oxford), he’s a “prime non-example” of the social mobility he so eagerly advocates. If he and the many public schoolboys like him feel they have too many of the top jobs, “they should set a good example and resign”. What they shouldn’t do is engage in this “babyish attempt” at class war. As former Tory minister Lord Waldegrave, now the Provost of Eton, points out, 25% of students at Oxford in the least-privileged socio-economic groups got there via bursaries at independent schools. At Eton itself, 21% of pupils are supported by bursaries. No wonder Waldegrave says he’ll resign the Tory whip if the Hancock test goes ahead. Enough of “this morbid, hackneyed and useless fascination with where one went to school”, agreed independent school headmaster Peter Hogan in the same paper. Many well-off kids go to state school; many poor ones to private school. It’s what you learn, not where, that matters.

The good news is that state schools have vastly improved under recent education ministers, said Matthew Parris in The Times: so much so, that second-rank independent schools find it ever harder to attract pupils. Yet the grip of the top public schools “on the commanding heights of career and status is undiminished”. And that bar to social mobility is a scandal, one that can’t be addressed by handing out bursaries to a few boys “from the back streets”. The only way to do it is to “level up as well as down”. “The brand must be trashed.” We must accept that “sneering at public-school toffs is healthy”. We must welcome the Hancock test. We must do more than that, said Melissa Benn in The Guardian. Instead of trying, but always failing, to scrap the anomalous tax advantages public schools enjoy, we should abolish the fee-paying principle and integrate private schools into a national system. In the 1970s, Finland made the astonishing decision to abolish all its private and selective schools. It now has “one of the world’s finest and fairest education systems”. Finland did it. We could too.