Best jobs go to former pupils of 10 elite schools

PUPILS from just 10 private and grammar schools produce 3 per cent of applicants to the most prestigious graduate recruitment schemes, new analysis has shown.

Jobs at the most sought-after law firms, management consultancies, banks and FTSE 100 companies – which offer graduate starting salaries of around £45,000 – are dominated by applications from an elite set of schools.

According to research by Rare, a recruitment company that specialises in encouraging diversity in the workplace, 1,435 students from the topranked 10 schools applied for the jobs, compared with 437 students from the entire bottom 10 per cent of schools.

The elite schools include Westminster School, which charges £36,000 a year for boarders, and whose alumni include former deputy prime minister Nick Clegg and the author AA Milne.

Sevenoaks School in Kent, a £34,000-a-year co-educational boarding school attended by the actor Daniel Day-Lewis was also among the group.

All the top 10 schools were independent except Queen Elizabeth’s School, a boys’ grammar in north London.

The data has become available after applications to 28 prestigious city graduate schemes were analysed using a Contextual Recruitment System.