Private schools are meant to help you get ahead. Not in Starmer’s cabinet
By Rob Harris
London: “Where did you go to school?” remains a very British question.
Eton College, a boys’ boarding school near Windsor, just down the road from Heathrow Airport on the western edge of London, has captured the British imagination in films, books and TV for decades.
The then Prince Charles drops off Prince Harry at Eton College in 1998.Credit: AP
It is, no doubt, because the exclusive school – which costs on average £46,000 ($87,400) a year per student – is the crucible for generations of political leaders.
No fewer than 20 of Britain’s 58 prime ministers were educated there, including the first, Robert Walpole, and, most recently, Boris Johnson.
In the past 80 years, 14 prime ministers – including the past six – have studied at the University of Oxford.
Britain remains still deeply hung up on class and privilege. Since the 1890s, if you hailed from the top 1 per cent of the wealth distribution, you were 20 times more likely than others your age to reach the British elite – namely, those included in Who’s Who.
But that might all be about to change.
Just one member of Keir Starmer’s cabinet went to a fee-paying school.Credit: AP
As Sir Keir Starmer’s new Labour cabinet got to work at the weekend, new analysis from the Sutton Trust – a UK educational charity which aims to improve social mobility – found just one member went to a fee-paying school.
Starmer’s top team has the smallest percentage of privately educated ministers in history. The Sutton Trust noted that 92 per cent of his appointees went to state-funded secondary schools that don’t select pupils based on academic achievement or aptitude.
It is a big and rather swift shift: 63 per cent of Rishi Sunak’s cabinet were privately educated. Some 32 per cent of those in Tony Blair’s first cabinet were privately educated, while the entirety of Anthony Eden’s 1955 cabinet went to private schools, as did 91 per cent of ministers who sat around Margaret Thatcher’s top table from 1979 to 1990.
Of the 25 cabinet ministers unveiled by Starmer on Friday, only Louise Haigh – the new transport secretary – went to a fee-paying school. Haigh, who attended Sheffield High School, is said to feel “quite uncomfortable” about her education.
Sutton Trust chief executive Nick Harrison said Starmer’s team was the most diverse in terms of education background ever recorded.
“It represents real progress towards smashing the class ceiling in politics, and it’s the closest to genuinely reflect the proportion of Brits who went to comprehensive schools,” he said. “But we now need to see this cabinet deliver policies that will help tackle the barriers that are stopping many young people getting on in life.”
Starmer is among the 40 per cent of his team who studied at either Oxford or Cambridge universities, having attended Oxford for his postgraduate degree in civil law.
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner left Avondale School in Cheadle Heath, a working-class community in Greater Manchester, aged 16 with no qualifications after becoming pregnant.
Starmer, the son of a toolmaker, spoke continually of his own working-class roots during the campaign.
His biographer, Tom Baldwin, said Starmer was the first Labour leader in generations to want to talk about class and snobbery. Many leading members of his team grew up in working-class households, some in deprivation, Baldwin said.
“These people have edge. It’s about this overcoming and then a ‘we’re gonna show you’ attitude to prove themselves, much more so than the previous cabinet in the Labour government of 1997,” he said.
Among the people Baldwin pointed to was Health Secretary Wes Streeting, who grew up in a working-class family in east London. Streeting’s maternal grandfather was an armed robber who spent time in prison, and his grandmother became embroiled in his crimes and also ended up in jail.
Starmer hosts his first cabinet meeting on Saturday.Credit: AP
Streeting funded his education through retail jobs and went on to study history at Cambridge.
Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson grew up in a single-parent council house in Washington, a former mining town in north-east England, and attended a state school, where she received free meals. She went on to win a place to read modern history at Oxford.
Starmer said at the weekend that he was proud of the fact he had people around that cabinet table who didn’t have the easiest start in life.
“I’m really proud of the fact that my cabinet reflects the aspiration that I believe lies at the heart of our country,” he said.
“The aspiration that so many people have, wherever they started from, to make a journey in life for themselves, for their families, for their communities and ultimately for their country.”
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