Class capture
Rupert Christiansen (Letters, July) does not seem to understand the relationship of the major public schools to Oxbridge. Their purpose is indeed not to produce “crassly entitled, brutally right-wing” oafs, though these are an occasional byproduct. Their real function is to take a group of children who are genuinely quite bright and make them look exceptional. This is obvious on reflection. Nobody is going to pay thousands of pounds a year for six or seven years to have their child come out looking exactly as able as they actually are.
The schools are directly engaged in social engineering. Their job is to move moderately talented children from wealthy families up the pecking order in the competition for places at the best universities. The admissions systems at Oxford and Cambridge are belatedly grasping that their job is to move them back down again to where they belong. Obviously this is unpopular with parents, who see their investments devalued. It also appears unpopular with insiders like Christiansen, who seem to believe that all that glisters actually is gold, and that if it doesn’t, it isn’t.
Rory O’Kelly, Kent
I would argue that one factor in this lack of social class diversity in the media is the decline of local newspapers (“The problem with journalism? It’s still too posh,” Prospect online).
Back in 2017, Press Gazette was bemoaning the collapse of local newspapers in London with the prospective closure of the Kensington and Chelsea News, which had gone from having 10 dedicated journalists covering stories in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in 1990 to none in 2017. In my own borough, one of the two newspapers that we had in the 1990s has closed, while the other now has a very limited (free) circulation.
Those local papers provided a route for the national newspapers to pick up local events that they could not afford to send a reporter to on the off-chance of a story, and for journalists to move on to the national papers and from there to the wider media.
Laurence Cox, via the website