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