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South Bristol MP Karin Smyth caused South Bristol MP Karin Smyth caused controversy when she said fee-paying private School, hit back at the MP’s comments, schools are damaging to Bristol ... describing them as ‘disappointing’

FEE-PAYING private schools are ‘damaging’ to Bristol and deprive the rest of the young people in the city of opportunities.

That was the stark message from one of Bristol’s MPs, who said it was ‘shameful’ that so few of the students in her constituency end up going to university.

Karin Smyth MP slammed private schools for ‘helping to create a more unequal society’, and said their ‘very existence actively encourages the underfunding’ of the regular state schools the vast majority of young people in Bristol go to.

There are 16 ‘independent’ schools, from the tiny Torwood House School in Redland to the 1,198-pupil Clifton College.

But in an article written for the Fabian Society, the Bristol South MP said action should be taken to curtail private schools, and called for a range of measures which she said would stop making life so easy for them - and also boost up young people who attend state school.

The Labour MP said she had ‘longstanding opposition’ to private school which, she said, ‘comes from a sincere belief that they are damaging to individuals and wider society alike’.

“They deprive young people like those in my Bristol South constituency of opportunities, they help to create a more unequal society, and their very existence actively encourages the underfunding of our state schools,” she said.

Ms Smyth’s South Bristol constituency is regularly bottom of a league table showing the proportion of 18-year-old school or college leavers who go to university - nowhere else in the country sends fewer of its young people to uni than South Bristol.

The MP described that as ‘shameful’, and said private schools were making the problem worse.

“Bristol is a vibrant city with two successful universities, yet fewer than 20 per cent of the young people growing up in my constituency go on to study in higher education,” she said.

“It is a chronic problem; of the other 649 constituencies represented in Parliament, none send fewer youngsters to university than Bristol South.

“This is a shameful situation, and one I am committed to reversing. It is also, in large part at least, a problem caused by the multiple private schools in and around Bristol; they damage state provision, and by dint of their very existence erect barriers that kids in south Bristol struggle to overcome,” she added.

Not only do fewer people from South Bristol go to university than from anywhere else in the country, but the most recent statistics showed a huge difference in different parts of Bristol.

Last year every single 18-year-old school leaver living in Clifton went to university, but in the most deprived areas of Ms Smyth’s South Bristol constituency, barely eight per cent did.

The MP then said that people who go to public school go on to dominate public life in Britain – at the expense of those who didn’t.

“While just seven per cent of all children attend private schools in the UK, they have dominated – and continue to dominate – the top positions in our society,” she said, outlining how 75 per cent of top judges, 45 per cent of Conservative MPs, one third of FTSE 100 CEOs, more than 50 per cent of leading journalists and more than half of British Oscar winners attended private schools.

“This imbalance is not just wrong; it’s really unsettling,” she said.

“It’s not representative of our communities and this dominance of exprivate school pupils creates a significant opportunity gap for our state school students,” added Ms Smyth.

“It’s clear that private schools offer a glass floor for the privileged few whilst 93 per cent of youngsters across the country are starved of opportunity.

“This is why we need a national debate on private schools. The key options should include taxing them fairly and looking towards introducing quotas for state school students in those universities or employment sectors where private school students are most dominant.

“We must never allow this debate to enter the realms of mere ideology.

“We must always look at what will work best to make our society less unequal. But we must do something. It’s time we ended the practice of having social mobility as window dressing, invested in our state education system and made the private sector have to survive on ‘little extras’ for a change,” she added.

They deprive young people like those in my Bristol South constituency of opportunities

MP Karin Smyth