Privilege in education and a right to govern?

My article in last week’s Cornish Guardian looked at the educational privilege of the UK Government’s Cabinet, compared to the rest of the UK. It was as follows:

The Prime Minister has just reshuffled his cabinet and the BBC was quick to carry out research into the make-up of his team. In this assessment, there was a strong focus on the educational background of the politicians, which showed that cabinet members were “ten times more likely to have gone to a private school than members of the public.”

The actual figures show that 6.5% of the general population have attended fee-paying schools, but for the cabinet of Eton-educated Boris Johnson, the figure is a massive 69%. I was a little surprised to see that this represents a considerable shift from Theresa May’s first cabinet, in which less than a third were educated at private schools.

I agree with Peter Lampl of the Sutton Trust, a charity which aims to improve social mobility and address educational disadvantage. He is adamant that the make-up of Johnson’s cabinet “underlines once again how unevenly spread the opportunities are to enter the elites” and that “Britain is an increasingly divided society … divided by politics, by class, by geography.”

This is borne out by the figures which show that 50% of Johnson's cabinet went to university at Oxford or Cambridge. Hardly a new phenomenon, 11 of the UK’s 15 post-war Prime Ministers went to Oxford. Of the remaining four, Winston Churchill and Gordon Brown went to Sandhurst’s Royal Military College and Edinburgh University respectively, while James Callaghan and John Major did not attend university.

The Government’s own Social Mobility Commission and the Sutton Trust recently published its Elitist Britain 2019 report. This states that: “The research finds that power rests with a narrow section of the population – the 7% who attend private schools and the 1% who graduate from Oxford and Cambridge. The report reveals a ‘pipeline’ from fee-paying schools through to Oxbridge and into top jobs.”

The document adds that: “Social mobility, the potential for those to achieve success regardless of their background, remains low … the most influential people across sport, politics, the media, film and TV, are five times as likely to have attended a fee-paying school.”

Figures from the Sutton Trust found that public bodies dominated by “private school alumni” include the judiciary (65% of senior judges), civil service permanent secretaries (59 per cent) and unelected Lords in the second chamber (57 per cent).

In 21st century Britain, this inequality in opportunity is frankly unjust. Why should someone educated at Fettes College, Harrow or Eton, continue to have such advantages over individuals who have gone to secondary schools in their local areas?