Engines of Privilege
Bloomsbury 320pp £20 The Week Bookshop £15.99
According to Alan Bennett, “private education is not fair. Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it... And those who receive it know it, or should.” His words are unanswerable, said Hugo Rifkind in The Times, and they provide the “moral backbone” of Francis Green and David Kynaston’s “forensic” and “damning” examination of what the authors call “Britain’s private school problem”. The pair (an economist and a social historian) chart the evolution of Britain’s fee-paying schools, analyse their social impact and discuss how to reform the system. While private schools educate about 7% of pupils, their alumni dominate the upper echelons of British society, from politics and law to acting and sport. Such success is hardly surprising, given they spend three times as much per pupil as state schools, have far smaller class sizes and invest in world-class facilities. If Engines of Privilege suffers from a problem, however, it is that it makes them seem almost too “amazing”. One is tempted to think: “Jeez, I gotta make sure my own kids are on the right side of that!”
In contrast to their shabby historic reputation, today’s top public schools immerse their pupils in luxury, said Janice Turner in the New Statesman. At Stowe, there’s a nightclub that apparently uses the kit from the now defunct Crazy Larry’s in Chelsea. At St Paul’s Girls’, lunch may be “Spanish smoky samfaina with eggs and rocket”. But while much of this spending is purely “egregious”, aimed at appealing to rich Russians and Chinese, it also helps prop up the system. With their facilities, excellent teachers (“attracted by better pay and shorter terms”), plus “academically selected pupils from affluent, aspirational families”, it’s no wonder “their alumni end up running the country”.
But according to the authors, a “twofold” reform process could reduce the system’s inequalities, said Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times. First, university admissions should take better account of educational backgrounds. Second, private schools should be forced to take more pupils from low-income backgrounds. Both solutions strike me as “bonkers”, however. It is “fantastical” to think our “ramshackle” university admissions system could really “weed out chinless chancers”. And a “Whitehall board deciding who is underprivileged” is the “stuff of parody”. Public schools are far from perfect, but I’m not sure they’re the main driver of inequality in modern Britain. The real problem is “we just cannot stop talking about them”.