Why does education stay the same?

Posted on 10/07/2026

Perhaps because they all had the same education …

Class inequality endures throughout England’s education system, argues Sol Gamsu, in part because of the shared educational background of those who have wielded power. Will Andy Burnham break with the cosy consensus?

Most education ministers in England went to private school and/or Oxbridge. Even the Labour ones.

Even under Labour, the major social and institutional inequalities that shape education rarely change. Oxbridge retains its social power and the economic wealth that keeps it there. The most elite of the private schools remain unscathed. England’s elite state schools, whether through catchment, faith, retained grammar school system or sixth form selection, remain a perpetual reminder of the unfinished business of comprehensive school reform. Is it a good idea to concentrate so much wealth in two universities and so few schools? Could there be a better way of choosing who will dominate most aspects of politics, culture and the economy (and possibly even one that might avoid the need for domination itself)?

The structural questions are rarely asked and even less rarely tackled. Most education ministers don’t view educational inequality from the top down, they view it from the bottom up. Much easier to problematise and often blame the (multiracial) working class than raise the thorny question of middle- and upper-class reproduction through the education system.

Perhaps this might have to do with the education that education ministers themselves received. Of the 20 Labour education ministers since 1900, 12 were privately educated and two attended grammar schools. For the Conservatives, 27 out of 35 were privately educated. Oxbridge holds a similar influence across both parties.

There are good reasons for thinking that educational background might align to educational politics. The history of education is littered with examples of privately educated education ministers and senior civil servants blocking more progressive forms of schooling or further education. Often, it was Conservative education ministers that did so. Gail Savage documented how the Liberal president of the Board of Education (the precursor to the minister of education before 1944), H. A. L. Fisher, snubbed requests by Durham County Council for more free secondary school places 1921, saying:

I doubt whether the Labour men who control educational policy in Durham realize the great importance of insisting upon a high standard of quality in the Secondary Education of the Country.[1]

Fisher (educated at Winchester College) was just one of many senior civil servants and ministers in the interwar period who were privately educated and opposed to progressive forms of secondary school reform. As president of the Board of Education in 1929, the Labour MP Charles Trevelyan (Harrow) blocked a proposal for multilateral (i.e. comprehensive) schooling.[2] Even that great critic of educational inequality, R. H. Tawney (Rugby), put his weight behind the tripartite system of (grammar) schooling at the end of World War I despite multilateral schools having support in the labour movement and the Labour Party.[3]

Examples of similar classism of those educated at highly elite institutions persisted as the 20th century continued. Keith Joseph (Harrow) and Ken Baker (St Paul’s) both intervened to make sure that middle-class ‘schools of proven worth’ did not lose their sixth forms in London when Labour councils’ attempted to create fully tertiary/FE systems of schooling in the 1980s.[4]

Attitudes amongst Labour ministers of the postwar period are more complicated, and would require a longer, more detailed study to explore in sufficient depth. However, as already noted, the education of Labour education ministers is barely less elitist than that of the Tories.

There are numerous examples of Labour politicians pulling back from reforms that would seriously damage the core institutions of middle-class reproduction. Ellen Wilkinson (a state- and University of Manchester-educated Fabian) showed reluctance to confront the public schools, for example, despite TUC and teacher union support,[5] a hesitancy that would be repeated in Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s. The half-hearted, and in many ways deliberately self-sabotaged, efforts of the New Labour government to remove selection have resulted in just one referendum on the question, which was lost in Ripon.[6]

Under New Labour, three out of six education ministers were privately educated and the same three also went to Oxbridge. Bridget Phillipson was not privately educated, but she went to Oxford to study history and French. Sunderland University, in her constituency, has decimated its arts and humanities provision with cut after cut and major job losses. Phillipson has never said a word about it.

For Labour, I think there is a deeper and more complicated history of educational elitism baked into the political history of certain wings of the Labour Party. In the early 20th century, Sydney Webb agreed with the arch-conservative Robert Morant – with whom he got on well – who successfully blocked local council experimentation with progressive forms of schooling. Morant wanted to preserve the public school as the model of secondary education. Webb wanted a technocratic elite of workers able to lead their class, and saw selective secondary education as the means to achieve this.[7]

Webb, I think, speaks to a particular type of elite/middle-class technocratic managerialism within the Labour Party which is quite comfortable with elite and elitist forms of education. Of the 20 Labour education ministers since 1900, 12 were Oxbridge educated. The figure for the Conservatives is 23 of 35.

The critique and rejection of Oxbridge by the more radical elements of the early labour movement, famously through the Ruskin strike and the Plebs League[8] as well as from figures like Mary Bridges Adams,[9] is long since forgotten.

Educational expansion, the expansion of the middle class, and the middle-class hegemony over the Parliamentary Labour Party and its leadership, has created a party which no longer sees education as the site of class struggle, if indeed it ever did. Instead, the language of class focuses on aspiration, social mobility and equal opportunity, with poverty the focus. Or worse, seeks to split apart working-class experience by privileging whiteness and, whether implicitly or explicitly, pitting Black and white working-class students against each other.

When the Conservatives govern, they almost unfailingly use education as a means to further class war on behalf of their own voter base. When Labour governs, most MPs no longer have the vocabulary or understanding of class or inequality that could be used to fight a genuine class war in education for the many not the few.

If the Green Party can articulate a clear left-vision on education, this could provide a counterweight that might pull Labour leftwards. Right now there is scant surety that Labour offers any major material improvement for those working or studying in education. Unless Burnham offers a substantial change there is little reason for anyone involved in education to vote Labour at all.

If that sounds depressing to people who work in education – whatever the sector – or care about it, perhaps the best solution is to get organised. I believe education workers, when coordinated, organised and politicised, can articulate and demand an emancipatory politics of education that sees learning as inseparable from a process of permanent struggle and liberation.

[1] Gail Savage, ‘Social Class and Social Policy: the civil service and secondary education in England during the interwar period’, Journal of Contemporary History, 18 (2), 1983, pp261-280.

[2] Hee‐Chun Kang, ‘Education and Equal Opportunity between the Wars’, Oxford Review of Education, 9 (2), 1983, pp91-108, pp99-100: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/0305498830090202.

[3]J. R. Brooks, ‘Labour and educational reconstruction, 1916‐1926: a case study in the evolution of policy’, History of education, 20 (3), 1991, pp245-259: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0046760910200305.

[4] Stuart Maclure, A History of Education in London 1870-1990 (2nd edn.), London, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1990.

[5] Nicholas Hillman, ‘Public schools and the Fleming report of 1944: shunting the first-class carriage on to an immense siding?’, History of Education, 41 (2), 2012, pp235-255.

[6] Demitri Coryton ‘The introduction of secondary education for all from the passage of the Education Act 1944 to the establishment of the Labour government in 1945 and the development of its policy for secondary education’, Education Journal Review, 28 (3), 2023.

[7] Kevin Brehony, ‘Popular control or control by experts? Schooling between 1880 and 1902’, in Mary Langan and Bill Schwarz (eds.), Crises in the British state 1880–1930, London, Hutchinson, 1985.

[8] Colin Waugh, ‘100 Years on from the Ruskin Strike … “Plebs”: The lost legacy of independent working-class education’, Sheffield, Post-16 Educator, 2009.

[9] Jane Martin, Making socialists: Mary Bridges Adams and the fight for knowledge and power, 1855–1939, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2018.