No Eton mess Drop in MSPs who are privately educated
But
FOR some years, The Herald has been crunching the numbers about our elected politicians, about where they went to school or university and what jobs they did before they were elected.
Our aim is to get a broad idea of the backgrounds of those who make up what is, in effect, our ruling political class. Are they diverse? Let’s take schooling. Certainly, Scotland’s newly-elected Parliament has more women than ever before – including the first of colour – and Holyrood also has its first permanent wheelchair user, among other disabled members.
But we also have details for the secondary education of 128 of our 129 MSPs. Of these, 23 went to independent schools. That is 18 per cent. So Holyrood members are about four times as likely to be privately educated as the average Scot.
Yet, although this latest number is higher than the figure for the 2011 Parliament, it is lower than the 20% recorded in 2016.
Put simply, the Conservative revival in Scotland is why Holyrood has slightly more privately educated members than in its early sessions. Around one-third of current Tory MSPs went to independent schools.
But the party’s politicians far from always live up to an old image of public schoolboys – even if two of its last three premiers at Westminster were Eton alumni. The Holyrood contingent of Conservatives does have three members who went to exclusive fee-paying maleonly schools in England. Only one MSP, Alexander Burnett, went to Eton, while another, Donald Cameron, attended Harrow, and Jamie Halcro Johnson studied at Radley College.
Newbie Glasgow MSP Sandesh Gulhane, a GP, was sent to the exclusive but co-educational Haberdashers’ in Elstree as a boy. These experiences may be stereotypical, but they are not typical.
It has been hailed for its diversity – how well do our MSPs really reflect the society we are?
Comprehensive Conservatives
THE anatomy of Conservatism has changed in recent years. Its pitch to wider unionism in Scotland and its hoovering up of pro-Brexit seats from Labour in the north of England has filled its ranks with one-time comprehensive kids.
At Westminster, some 29% of MPs of all parties went to private schools, a fall after the most recent election, partly because some new Tories from the old red wall seats tend to have state educations.
In the new Holyrood, first-time Conservative MSPs include Meghan Gallacher, who was educated at the North Lanarkshire comprehensive Brannock High.
Moreover, being independently educated is not necessarily evidence of privilege of wealth. Take the Scottish Greens. On paper this small group of eight has two members who did not get a state schooling. But one of these is new MSP Maggie Chapman, who was brought up in Zimbabwe where she attended the Dominican Convent School in Harare.
However, this school is actually cheaper than state secondaries – and Ms Chapman had a fairly democratic education, picking up the Shona she used to make her oath at the opening of the new parliamentary session. The British division between free state and fee-paying state schools just does not have much meaning when it comes to schooling in subsaharan Africa.
SNP MSP and now Cabinet minister Mairi Gougeon went to the private Kilgraston school, but with a scholarship.
SNP and Labour have about the same proportion of privately educated MSPs. That is three out of 22 for Labour and eight out of 63 for the SNP.
MSP’s refusal to answer
MARIE McNair, the nationalist who represents Clydebank and Milngavie, failed to answer questions about her background. She is the first MSP to do so in the history of this project. That means The Herald’s figures for her party and the Parliament as a whole are incomplete.
Two SNP MSPs, Health Secretary Humza Yousaf and backbencher John Mason went to Glasgow’s Hutchesons’ Grammar. So did Labour leader Anas Sarwar, who earlier this year acknowledged “fair criticism” of him for sending his own children to his alma mater. Mr Sarwar, whose father is millionaire businessman and politician Mohammed Sarwar, this year replaced Richard Leonard as head of his party. Mr Leonard had attended the fee-paying Pocklington School.
“Hutchie” also educated two MPs and is overall the most successful school in Scotland. However, it shares its title in Holyrood with a comprehensive, Madras College in St Andrews, the alma mater of the SNP’s Jenny Gilruth and Jenni Minto, and the Liberal Democrat Alex Cole-Hamilton.
There is a pattern here too. There is a strong contingent of MSPs who went to high-performing comprehensives in better-off towns or suburbs. League tables
for state schools are very controversial – with educational experts stressing they often reflect demographics, and not the quality of teaching.
Some 92 MSPs attended Scottish state schools, some of which no longer exist. Of these, 12 went to comprehensives ranked, by exam results, in the top 10% of state schools this year. Just four went to secondaries currently in the bottom 10%.
Two MSPs, Labour’s Neil Bibby and the SNP’s Natalie Don, got their secondary education at Gryffe High School, the highest-ranked ordinary council comprehensive in Scotland, at least by the share of its pupils to leave school with five of more higher or equivalent qualifications.
One, newbie Karen Adam, attended Aberdeen’s Northfield Academy, which serving a deprived area had the secondlowest academic outcomes in the country.
High achievers
SEVERAL schools have produced more than one MSP in the current crop. Aside from Hutchesons’, private secondaries represented more than once in Parliament include Edinburgh Academy and George Watson’s. The comprehensives with two MSPs each are Harlaw in Aberdeen, Kirkwall Grammar in Orkney, and Holyrood and Hyndland secondaries in Glasgow.
Some MSPs studied abroad, all in former British dominions. The SNP’s George Adam was brought up in South Africa, his party colleague Elena Whitham went to a Francophone secondary in Montreal while Siobhan Brown was educated at a prestigious, fee-paying school in Sydney. Green co-leader Lorna Slater attended a highlyregarded and historic state high school in Calgary, Alberta.
There are no first-generation migrants from a non-English-speaking background is currently in Holyrood, no-one who did their secondary schooling in a EU nation, for example.
Paul Cairney is a professor of politics and public policy at Stirling University and has long studied the backgrounds of politicians. He thinks figures for private schooling of politicians matter.
“Scotland combines a mostly comprehensive system with a fairly low private school element,” he said. “As such, there is a potential double whammy of private schooling: if an MSP is educated privately and/or they send their child to private school, how can they speak with experience or authority on the current schooling of most people in Scotland?” It is not MSPs, of course, who chose where they went to school, but their parents and guardians.
If an MSP is educated privately, how can they speak with authority on mainstream schooling?