Two-thirds of new cabinet went to private schools

Almost two-thirds (64%) of Boris Johnson’s cabinet received a private education, which is more than twice that of Theresa May’s 2016 cabinet (30%), the Sutton Trust has revealed.

Cameron’s 2015 cabinet meanwhile had 50 per cent privately educated and the 2010 coalition cabinet had 62 per cent.

This means that cabinet ministers are nine times more likely to have gone to a fee-paying school for all or part of their secondary education than the general population, of which 7% went to private schools.

Importantly however, the new Education Secretary was educated at a state school, as was the Chancellor, Foreign Secretary, and Home Secretary.

The proportion of independently educated ministers attending Cabinet is less than earlier cabinets under Conservative Prime Ministers, John Major (71% in 1992) and Margaret Thatcher (91% in 1979). Tony Blair and Gordon Brown both had 32% of those attending cabinet privately educated, while 25% of Clement Attlee’s first cabinet had been privately educated.

Of the 33 ministers attending Boris Johnson’s new cabinet, 45% went to Oxford or Cambridge universities. This compares with 31% of all Conservative MPs, 20% of Labour MPs and 24% of all MPs. A further 24% of Johnson’s cabinet were educated at other Russell Group universities (excluding Oxbridge).

Except for Gordon Brown, every Prime Minister since 1937 who attended university was educated at one institution – Oxford.

Sir Peter Lampl, founder and chairman of the Sutton Trust, said: “Britain is an increasingly divided society. Divided by politics, by class, by geography. Social mobility, the potential for those to achieve success regardless of their background, remains low. Addressing this must be at the heart of our new Prime Minister’s tenure in Downing Street.

“The make-up of Johnson’s cabinet underlines once again how unevenly spread the opportunities are to enter the elites. The key to improving social mobility at the top is to tackle financial barriers to entry, adopt contextual recruitment and admissions practices and, critically, to tackle social segregation in schools.”