Fraser Nelson

State schools, not private schools, are the real sponsor of inequality in Britain

• 28 June 2015, 12:00am

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  Fraser Nelson

  State schools, not private schools, are the real sponsor of inequality in Britain

  

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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

When I was researching my Ch4 documentary last year, How The Rich Get Richer, I tried to fill in some of the gaps in research. I was lucky enough to work with the Centre for Social Justice, who looked at the inequality within the state system. We found that, as the above graphic shows, a near-perfect inequality relationship.

I wonder how Will Hutton would explain this graph? Does he believe that the poorest 10pc are thick, and the richest 10pc are the smartest? Or might it be that state schooling is best in the leafy areas, and worse in the council estates? And might his anger be better directed at the sink schools, which stymie the life chances of their graduates and inflict such damage on the communities that they’re supposed to serve?

Hutton writes:-

Opting out is the process that fuels inequality, still the hallmark of our education system. The Sutton Trust found that despite the recent improvement, children from the richer fifth of neighbourhoods are nine times more likely to go to a good university than the fifth from the poorest.

The ‘richer fifth’ means 20 per cent. Private schools educate 7pc. So surely the problem is more broader than one of the “social apartheid of private education?” Absurdly, he then points the finger at school reform:

Free schools and academies are disproportionately represented in richer areas.

Even if this were true, there are only 250 free schools (not 400, as he claims) and only 133 Academies have been around long enough to have educated people through secondary years. There are several thousand state schools in England: can the new ones really be the villains?

And then this:-

If we want a society in which the mass flourishes, then fragmenting our system into one built on autonomy, opting out and individualism – cementing inequalities – is precisely the wrong direction of travel.

So let’s take another look at the graph for the unfragmented and ‘universal’ state system which educates 93pc pupils:-

The unreformed state system rigorously sorts out the poorest with the worst results; this ought to appall any meritocrat. Yet this is what Hutton is defending.

It’s tragic that the energy of the left’s finest minds is directed at reheating well-worn clichés rather than trying to go to the source of the problem. But the left does sees trapped in an intellectual cul-de-sac at the moment. The social justice agenda really is David Cameron’s for the taking.