The extraordinary but longstanding over-representation of those educated in the private sector, most conspicuously in the major ‘public’ schools, in, for example, politics, the judiciary, newspapers and the commentariat is well documented and well know. This is the very stuff of elite recruitment and the reproduction of class relations. Less appreciated, perhaps, is the salience of privileged parents and schooling for artistic and sporting success. In their Engines of Privilege, published in 2019, Green and Kynaston draw on the research of the Sutton Trust to offer a few revealing statistics. The following quotation comprises the core of this brief blog. Bear in mind while reading it that only 7% of kids are education privately.
‘Over the past quarter-century, some 60% of British winners of Oscars and 42% of British BAFTA winners have been privately educated; as for the field of popular music, once almost totally dominated by the state-educated (think Beatles, think Rolling Stones), almost 20% of Brits winners since the inception of the awards in 1977 have been at private schools. So, too, with sport. In rugby union, the privately educated share of England’s 2007 World Cup squad hit 60%; in cricket, and England team at Lord’s in 2011 comprised eight privately educated and just three state-educated; and a third of the British medallists at the Rio Olympics in 2016 came from private schools, as had the medallists from the four previous Olympics combined. Overall, revealed an Offstead report in 2014, one-third of contemporary England sporting internationals were privately educated.’
Born to succeed! And as Bukodi and Goldthorpe’s latest research on social mobility confirms, it’s what Archer calls one’s ‘involuntary placement’ in society at birth that matters hugely (see others of my blogs)! I guess this is a multifactorial issue, calling upon biological and psychological as well as social factors (which strata may be epistemologically irreducible the one to the other but which are nonetheless ontologically inter-related – sorry!). But the myth, ‘dream’, that talent will out clearly requires debunking, and then some.
Socially, extant research confirms the salience of parental material and socio-cultural advantage and support, secure and healthy childhoods, aspiring reference groups, peer support, role models, self-fulfilling prophecies and so on. This is not the place to delve deeper. But I must close with another revealing quotation from Green and Kynaston. It refers to facilities at Tonbridge, as recounted by England cricketer Ed Smith:
‘We had twelve rugby pitches, each tended to perfection and cut in geometric stripes. We had two hockey Astrturfs that doubled up as twenty-one tennis courts. We had an Olympic-standard running track. We had more cricket nets – ten artificial ones, and ten grass ones – than any professional team I ever played for.’
Smith rated the Tonbridge 1st XI cricket pitch second only to that of Lord’s.