A major new report has found that across a range of sectors, the UK’s most powerful and influential people are still five times more likely to have attended private schools than the general population. Top jobs in media, business, charity, creative and public sectors remain dominated by those from private schools. State educated people are hugely underrepresented in senior roles.
According to the research by social mobility charity The Sutton Trust, little has changed since 2019 and the proportion of privately schooled leaders in some professions has actually increased, including FTSE100 chairs, newspaper columnists and BBC executives. However, increasingly important online influencers and content creators are far more likely to have been state educated than those in traditional media.
The most powerful and influential people in the UK remain five times more likely to have attended a fee-paying school than the general population. Members of this leadership elite are also twice as likely to go to university, over five times more likely to have gone to a Russell Group university and 21 times more likely to have gone to Oxford or Cambridge than the general population.
Just 7% of the general population attends private schools. However, Elitist Britain, a new report published by the Sutton Trust, lays bare the extent to which the UK remains dominated by people from elite education backgrounds across a variety of fields, including politics, media, business, sport and the creative arts. Despite significant social and political change since 2019, little progress has been made in ensuring Britain’s leadership class better reflects the broader population.
Of the FTSE100 CEOs who were educated in the UK, only a third (34%) attended a state comprehensive school – a figure unchanged since 2019 – while almost two fifths attended private school (37%). FTSE100 chairs were even more likely to be privately educated than their CEOs, and more likely to be Oxbridge-educated too. Of those educated in the UK, just 1 in 10 went to a state comprehensive, while two thirds (68%) were privately educated. This makes them the most privately educated profession in this report and represents a 15 percentage point increase since 2019. Nearly half (45%) of all UK-educated chairs attended Oxbridge, up from 43% in 2019, while 41% went to both private school and Oxbridge.
However, the report shows that elitism isn’t just an issue for big businesses. Around a third of charity CEOs attended a private school (34%), over half attended a Russell Group institution (52%), and almost 1 in 5 attended Oxbridge. And the most senior public servants are also overwhelmingly from elite education backgrounds. 62% of senior judges attended a private school, largely unchanged from 2019 (where it was 65%), making it one of the professions with the highest private school attendance. Senior judges are also the profession with the highest proportion of Oxbridge graduates in this report, with three quarters (75%) having studied there. This has increased from 71% in 2019.
The backgrounds of leading figures in the media also remain highly unrepresentative. The gap is particularly prominent amongst newspaper columnists (50% privately educated), political commentators (47%), podcasters (45%), and BBC executives (38%). The proportions of privately educated BBC executives has increased by 10 percentage points since 2019, while privately educated newspaper columnists increased by nearly 7 percentage points. At least 20% of the key individuals in these professions are Oxbridge alumni, with nearly half having attended a Russell Group university.
This contrasts starkly with the rise of high-profile social media influencers and content creators, which the report has examined for the first time given their rapid growth in importance over the past six years. This category is among the most diverse, with only 18% of influencers and content creators having attended private school, while 68% attended a state comprehensive, and 10% attended a state grammar.
Influencers and content creators are also among the least likely to have attended Russell Group universities (16%) or Oxbridge (4%) in the report. Just over half (51%) attended university, which is much lower than other sections of the traditional media examined in this report, and far more reflective of British society as a whole. This is likely because there is no formal established route into developing a social media following, with fewer barriers to entry for those with talent from all backgrounds.
The findings are compounded by new YouGov polling conducted for the Sutton Trust, revealing very limited progress amongst companies measuring the socio-economic backgrounds of their workforce since 2019. For example, just 9% of employers ask whether employees were eligible for free school meals, and only 15% ask about the profession or class background of employees’ parents. While 60% record information on ‘protected characteristics’ like gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation.
And there has been only a slight increase in the proportion of companies using contextual recruitment, which considers applicants’ credentials in the context of their background. Only 17% of firms say they are systematically using contextual recruitment practices, up just 2% on 2019.
Carl Cullinane, Director of Research and Policy at the Sutton Trust, said: “This polling suggests that most employers aren’t building a talent pipeline of young people from less advantaged backgrounds. And while there have been efforts to make business more inclusive, work on social mobility is patchy, and too often, social class is not included in the diversity conversation. Just one in ten companies run specific schemes to support employees in terms of social mobility.
“This means they’re potentially limiting their talent pool. Making the most of talent, wherever it comes from, means employers can move beyond a narrow cohort of candidates from the most advantaged backgrounds. This can be a win-win for employers, society, and the economy.”
The Sutton Trust is calling on the Government to require employers with over 250 staff to report on the socio-economic background of their workforce, and encourage reporting of class pay gaps. Collecting this information allows employers to understand the make-up of their workforce to identify and tackle access and progression gaps.
Employers should also look at education achievements in the context of disadvantage, including attending underperforming schools and less advantaged neighbourhoods, as well as looking beyond a narrow range of universities. This will help to widen the talent pool of applicants, and help build a pipeline of leaders that better reflects the experiences of society more broadly.
You can take a look at the full report from The Sutton Trust here.
Register or log in to get started in your organisation
Photo by Unseen Studio on Unsplash
