Why we do not need elitism in education

it’s nice to be here

i’ve been on strike uh most the last

couple of weeks

um so if you haven’t already gone down

to a higher education institution to

give your

give your support please do so and that

is also an excuse for

um being a bit rushed and putting this

together um but nonetheless i want to

start by asking you to imagine

um an elite higher education institution

so picture it in your head what does it

look like it’s a university with a long

reputation maybe an international

reputation

research excellence and all the rest of

it most likely you thought of somewhere

that looks a bit like this that’s the

bowling library in oxford

and baillial college where our prime

minister went oxford and cambridge

together educate about one percent of

english school students that go on to

university

so a tiny percentage of the overall

student body and the overall age cohorts

and even smaller percentage of that

and yet oxford and cambridge in 2018 had

a combined

financial endowment so that just means

the investments

the properties shares they hold

that creates interest which then funds

the

funds these institutions of 21 billion

pounds which is

vastly more than any other education

institution in the uk

not as much as those in the states but

pretty big for the uk

and this money that sustains and creates

an elite educational institution not

just higher education institutions but

also

the elite elite schools private schools

in particular which i’m going to talk

about

um a bit more this money doesn’t come

from nowhere

and what we need to do when we think

about the inequalities in our education

system

is think about where the money’s coming

from money finds a way

uh is perhaps the kind of other subtitle

to this talk there’s a long history of

dirty money in education and

in oxford they’ve recently accepted 150

million pound donation from stephen

schwartzman

for a new center for the humanities you

know you might think great humanities

are under attack at the moment

history the arts they need the money but

this money stephen schwartzman works for

blackstone group which is a big american

investment firm

and there’s a group of staff at the

university of oxford who

have formed the campaign to argue that

the university shouldn’t have accepted

this donation

because blackstone group is invested in

the deforestation of the amazon

it’s invested in companies that have

caused the global housing crisis

and a bit closer to home they’re

invested in uh

private companies that do nhs services

um that are paid for nhs

services but don’t pay any tax on the

profits that they make

so um there’s the oxford against

fraudsmen campaign there

is a long history of this kind of

philanthropic donation

to elite educational institutions which

we need to think about

whenever we see kind of educational

prestige

and whenever we kind of make that

assumption that what we’re looking at

is just created through excellent

teaching excellent research whatever

whatever that may mean

and this is also true when you think

about private schools

so this is colston school in bristol

and colston school was named after

edward colston who’s up here

and he was a slaver he was a slave

trader and

a lot of the money that founded um

bristol’s private schools

there are three which have kind of links

to the private to um

slave trade it comes from the profits of

slavery

and there’s another private school in

scotland which is pictured here

dollar academy which has the same story

now for a lot of elite educational

institutions their finances

are a bit more uh difficult to pick

apart

it’s difficult to look at where exactly

the money came from

that founded these institutions that

either were from the beginning

or later became institutions for the

elite and for the middle class

and there are kind of a few other

examples that i’ll mention briefly

places like simples in london some

poor’s boys school

which was uh funded by land in the east

end of london

in stepney working class rents working

class neighborhood um

were funding uh a private school in the

west end

until the land was compulsory purchased

by the labour government but i won’t get

into too much detail

um the other and the the biggest

uh and most and wealthiest educational

institution

in the uk is trinity college cambridge

which is one of the

colleges that make up the university of

cambridge now

if you’ve ever been to the millennium

dome not the doncaster dome i nearly

said that

i used to go swimming there um uh

millennium dome

uh then you’ve inadvertently funded

trinity college because they are in the

land on which it sits

the company that the millennium dome uh

belongs to pays rent to trinity college

they also own

the port of felix though they have

shares in arms companies

and uh they also perhaps worst of all

own shares in arcos which is the company

that put the cladding

on the grenfell tower

so when we look at elite educational

institutions

when you see trinity college what i want

you to think

is not that’s a pretty building what i

want you to ask is

where did the money come from to build

this

what is behind that nice stone facade

because more often than not what you

find is that what is behind

that stone is flesh it’s people

who are exploited and it’s their stories

that are not told

but it’s their stories that provide the

profits and continue to

provide the profits that allow elite

education to be possible in this country

and internationally even if um

you know these investments were somehow

ethical we’d still have the basic

problem of inequality

so this is eaton’s endowment as reduced

increased year on year

so in the endowment again it’s just the

property they are and the investments

the stocks and shares

now if you look at eaton’s um income in

2017-18 it was 72 million pounds

that works out as 55

800 pounds per student now compare that

to

local state schools in windsor and

maidenhead they have

um a per student income in the same year

of 5 000 pounds

and you still have this kind of even if

those investments were ethical and

i i don’t think it would really be

possible but even if they were ethical

you’d still have this basic problem of

inequality

are some children are some children

worth 10 times more than others

not all private schools are as wealthy

as eaton but still

in newcastle if if you were talking

about the difference between the royal

grammar school and the other state

schools

in in this city then you’d still be

talking about the school

having two or three times more income

than most state schools

so what we did

last year and and the kind of task that

remains

and that is still there despite the fact

that in these times when

we have a resurgence of right-wing

nationalism we have a billionaire in the

white house

and our 20th italian prime minister

there is still the need

to keep the ideas alive and to keep the

knowledge alive

of how inequality in our education

system is produced

and how inequality in our society is

maintained

and what we did me and three other

school teachers and brilliant school

teachers

last year we formed the labour campaign

against private school

or abolishing which was a campaign to

integrate private schools into the state

sector

and to change labour party policy and we

did that and it was the first time in 40

years

that the labour party conference uh

changed

um that talked about this at its

conference so labor body policy is in

theory

um to bring back private bring private

schools back into the state sector

we’re a long way away from that with the

general election result

but however far we are away from it the

task that still falls on us

is to keep id the ideas of what an

alternative system of

education could look like and also to

remember

how these inequalities are produced and

that means

doing the local work of raising

political consciousness around about

educational inequality how it’s produced

at a local level and i’m sure there are

many of you in this room

that know and have first-hand experience

of it either with students or teachers

or both

that means also contesting and

rethinking the way that

the way that education and equality is

understood and how it’s framed in this

country we’ve had the social mobility

commission

for 10 years in the uk and the social

mobility commission is obsessed

with fair access to elite jobs and elite

universities

and fair enough you might think but

this commission has never asked whether

those elite institutions or those elite

careers

are a good idea in the first place not

once

as he asked that and if we only think

about things in terms of

access to these elite institutions then

the question

of the existence of these elite

institutions in the first place

is a question that we never ask and

access matters of course it matters it’s

vital i work at

durham university and durham university

needs to change

and there are moves now to to try and

improve access for working class and

ethnic minority students

to durham there are ambitious targets

and that’s a good thing

but if we only think about access there

are

we narrow the way that we think about

educational inequality in this country

it becomes very difficult then to talk

about institutional inequality and it

becomes very difficult

to put into question whether in fact a

system

which is based on the concentration of

wealth into a very small number of

institutions

in fact makes any sense whatsoever it

also leads to potential the potential

for unintended consequences

so this is this is durham this is castle

college and sunderland university which

i’m sure people in the room will be

familiar with

uh and familiar familiar perhaps with

this story which is that they’re facing

cuts in their politics and languages

departments

now durham in 2018-19

took five and a half percent of its

students from

um low higher education participation

neighborhoods

right sunderland took nearly 30

and if we think about where access

happens

it is not in elite institutions like

durham

though they may need to change and they

should change

it’s in places like this it’s in further

education colleges

it’s in post 92 universities

comprehensives

that have fought against the grain of

government policy which is obsessed with

access to elite institutions but if we

in seeking to broaden access to

somewhere like durham or oxford or

cambridge

in the context of the northeast if we

lower the

the the offers to get into to get into

durham which is something that is is on

the table and which should happen

there is the risk that we then

effectively

steal students that would have gone to

sunderland or t

side or northumbria and

that for me is is the last thing that

that i think we should be doing

so there are these real contradictions

that

are not resolvable within the current

kind of discourse

and and way that educational inequality

is is understood in this country

and i wanted to talk about the problem

of access and mention

um a local uh writer who some of you

might be familiar with

um jack common who was a working-class

writer

from heaton he said that always the

pride that prevailed in this

working-class school

and he’s talking about going to school

in the in the 20s

um was that it succeeded in turning out

less recruits for the working class

than any other of its kind in the

district that less was still the

majority mind you

a great crowd that stayed on for two or

three years after the scholarship

calling was over

but what they were celebrating was

always the minority that went on

to in this case grammar schools and

perhaps entire education after that

and now it may not be that we’re

celebrating the students that go on to

grammar school

but if you look at most school websites

it’s success in getting into the russell

group and to oxbridge and to dentistry

and medicine courses

and for most state schools in the uk

that will only ever be a minority

because we have never had in this

country an educational system that truly

serves the majority of people

whether it’s the exam system or the

financial inequalities that i’ve talked

about here

we’ve always had a system that protects

and serves the few

not the many what we need to do is to

to keep the ideas alive that will allow

that will allow us to kind of build

alternative alternative futures for

higher education and for education more

broadly

and we’re surrounded constantly by paths

not taken

this is an example towards a

comprehensive university which was an

argument by robin pedley that we should

extend

comprehensive school reform into post 16

into higher education

and these ideas are still alive and

they’re still alive in books like this

from colleagues at bristol and in

reports like this that we put together

for class

and and the kind of the whispers and the

phantoms

that haunt the elite educational

institutions these ideas of alternative

systems

they’re still there and they’re still

there even within the bastions of

privilege

because there are those of us who would

build this world anew

even if that means pulling down the

pillars of privilege

that have sustained us and benefited us

thanks very much