James Brooke-Smith
What does educational privilege look like now?
The debate about private education in Britain is clouded by our inability to see beyond the old signifiers of class privilege – newspaper reports about private schools are often adorned with images that conjure the bygone days of the Brideshead set, with lush green playing fields, ancient architecture, young men in tailcoats walking purposefully through gothic cloisters. The prominence of politicians like Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, both of whose public images harken back to the public school archetypes of yesteryear – the Edwardian stage toff and the Flashman-style ruling-class libertine – only adds to the air of anachronism.
But the real effects of educational privilege are subtler than this would suggest.
As the Sutton Trust’s report “Elitist Britain 2019” demonstrates, it is not only the traditional redoubts of the judiciary (65% privately educated), the upper ranks of the civil service (59%), the military (49%) and parliament (39% of the cabinet) that are dominated by privately educated graduate. It’s also glamorous cultural industries such as journalism (44% of leading newspaper columnists), film and TV (38%), and pop music (20%).
Since the social upheavals of the 1960s, a new style of elite identity has emerged. Members of what sociologists call the “ordinary elite” are more self-effacing than their forebears. Instead of distinguishing themselves with exclusive tastes and clearly defined accents, they stress meritocratic achievement, work ethic, cosmopolitanism, openness to diversity and cultural omnivorousness. Today’s typical private school graduate is less likely to look like Jacob Rees-Mogg, than to blend in with the trendy, demotic, plugged-in professionals who work in the steel and plate glass offices of London’s media and cultural hubs.
The private education sector has been radically transformed over the last 60 years. In the 1960s, for the first time in their history, private schools faced competition from a well-funded, rapidly expanding state education system and opposition from the Labour Party, which in its 1964 and 1966 manifestos pledged to abolish private education.
In response, the independent sector underwent what one historian has called an “academic revolution.” In place of the Victorian ideals of classical learning and gentlemanly character building, private schools began to focus on exam results and careers guidance. In the 1980s, while funding for state education was shrinking in real terms, private schools raised their fees by an average of 76%. This new money was spent on ever more opulent facilities and smaller class sizes. The curriculum was updated to include a wide range of subjects such as Russian, Mandarin, business studies, art history, theatre, design and engineering alongside the traditional Greek and Latin.
Today, it is from the private sector that we hear some of the most progressive, even utopian, statements about the purpose of education. In 2006 Anthony Seldon, former headmaster of Wellington College, announced that his school would augment its curriculum with ‘happiness lessons’ and focus more on the ‘well-being’ of students. The true aim of education, he claimed, was to help students to ‘become themselves’ through engagement with a tantalising array of extra-curricular activities that ranged from pottery and tennis to drama and ballet. Mike Grenier, a teacher at Eton, advocates “slow education,” a form of free-range learning for its own sake, which repudiates the relentless focus on core subjects and exam preparation encouraged by the national curriculum.
These changes have taken place against the backdrop of dwindling arts provision in the state sector. It was the Conservative Education Act of 1988 that first deemed music lessons “non-essential” to state education. In 1993 the government allowed schools to pass the cost of music lessons on to parents, further curtailing access for the less well-off. Today, after nearly a decade of austerity, cuts to local council and state school budgets have caused administrators to neglect supposedly non-essential arts programs in order to preserve funding for “core” subjects. A recent Fabian Society report shows that 68% of state primary schools have seen arts provision decrease in the last five years. Significantly, the new Ebacc qualification that has replaced the GCSE has no place for creative subjects.
But the predominance of privately educated graduates within the cultural industries is not only the product of lavish facilities and a broad curriculum. There are also less tangible factors at play.
The pathway into glamorous cultural fields is highly precarious and offers no guarantee of success. Aspiring journalists, actors, filmmakers and publishers often spend years working in unpaid internships or on low-paid temporary contracts. Without the safety net of parental support, and the socially-learned confidence to take a wager on your own future, many talented candidates don’t even enter the race.
As the sociologists Sam Friedman and Daniel Laurison demonstrate in their recent book, The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged, there are also unspoken codes of poise, confidence and cultural literacy that enable privately educated candidates to form a rapport with hiring committees and senior managers, a disproportionate number of whom were themselves educated at expensive private schools.
This is how the cultural elite replicates itself: not through some shadowy conspiracy of the old school tie, but through the unspoken – and often unconscious – bias of class privilege.
James Brooke-Smith is an associate professor of English literature at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of Gilded Youth: Privilege, Rebellion, and the British Public School (2019), an account of upper-class adolescence in Britain and the role of elite private education in shaping youth culture.
