Old school politics
More Prime Ministers have been educated at Eton than any other school
JUST three schools are responsible for educating more than half of all the British politicians to become Prime Minister. In the last 300 years, there have been a total of 55 different Prime Ministers - although many of them served multiple terms of office.
More were educated at Eton College than any other secondary school, including Britain’s very first Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, who served from 1721 until 1742; and the UK’s current PM, Boris Johnson.
In fact, 20 Prime Ministers have received a private education at the famous school, also including David Cameron, Harold Macmillan, William Ewart Gladstone, and Arthur Wellesley - the Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo and served as PM from 1828 to 1830, and again, briefly, in 1834.
Eton, Britain’s most famous feepaying school, was founded in 1440 by King Henry VI and currently costs £14,698 per term.
Of the 20 Old Etonian Prime Ministers, eight were members of the Conservative Party, and two were Liberals.
There were also five Whigs - the political party that eventually merged into the Liberal Party in the 1850s - and five Tories, the early precursors to the Conservatives and rivals of the Whigs.
The last six PMs educated at Eton have all been Conservatives.
Archibald Primrose, the
5th Earl of Rosebery (Liberal) was the last Old Etonian to reach 10 Downing Street without the support of the Conservative Party. He served as PM from 1894 until 1895.
Harrow has educated the nexthighest number of PrimeI Ministers, with seven, including Winston Churchill, who led the nation to victory during the Second World War, and Spencer Perceval, the only British premier to have ever been assassinated.
Churchill, PM between 1940 and 1945, and again from 1951 to 1955, was the last Harrow man to reach 10 Downing Street.
Westminster School, the public school sited next to Westminster Abbey in the heart of London, has been responsible for the education of six Prime Ministers, the most recent of whom was Lord John Russell, the Whig and Liberal statesman who served as PM from 1846 until 1852 and again from 1865 until 1866.
Dr Wanda Wyporska, Executive Director, The Equality Trust said: "Surely nothing demonstrates rank inequality better than the fact that so many Prime Ministers have come from just three eye-wateringly expensive private schools.
“But we know that the top jobs and professions are dominated by those who went to fee-paying schools. But it is extremely difficult for this narrow pool of the elite to make decisions that affect our lives when they have no idea how the majority live, and this makes for poor policy decisions, such as the removal of the £20 uplift to Universal Credit."
Despite the apparent advantages of a public school education on a career in politics, seven of Britain’s 10 most recent Prime Ministers - Theresa May, Gordon Brown, John Major, Margaret Thatcher, James Callaghan, and Edward Heath - went to state schools.
However, there is even less educational diversity when it comes to university, with all but 15 of Britain’s Prime Ministers studying at Oxbridge - 27 at Oxford and 13 at Cambridge.
Since Winston Churchill - who went to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst rather than university - all of Britain’s PMs have studied at Oxford University, with the exception of Gordon Brown, who went to Edinburgh.