No, private schools aren’t victims of ‘reverse discrimination’ – and Cambridge should know better | Lee Elliot Major

16 hours ago 9

A Cambridge college’s plan to target students from some of the country’s most elite private schools has struck a nerve. As reported by the Guardian, Trinity Hall justified the move by claiming that a focus only on “greater fairness in admissions” could “unintentionally result in reverse discrimination”. Alumni LinkedIn feeds and social media threads quickly filled with outrage, as many Cambridge graduates interpreted the move as class prejudice rearing its ugly head once again. One angry fellow at the college said it amounted to a “slap in the face” for their state-educated undergraduates.

It brought back memories of the sneering snobbery at Oxford when the former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, then principal of Lady Margaret Hall, introduced a new foundation year. “We don’t do hard luck stories,” sniffed one academic. “Oxford doesn’t do remedial education,” complained another. The foundation year at Oxford and also at Cambridge has since enjoyed huge success, proving that students who have faced great adversity or academic disadvantage can flourish when given the chance.

The words “reverse discrimination” are jarring. Whatever the intentions behind Trinity Hall’s policy, singling out a tiny cadre of already highly resourced schools sends a powerful signal: that academic quality is most reliably found there, and moving beyond this clique risks lowering standards. In a society marked by extreme inequalities in wealth, schooling and opportunity, the claim that these institutions are the victims of discrimination would be difficult to sustain – even by the cleverest of Cambridge dons.

For others, this is a classic case of what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would term “misrecognition”: mistaking polished performance and extra preparation, which is so often shaped by privilege, for greater underlying talent – and sincerely believing this to be fair. The furore centres on recruitment for a handful of places in subjects such as music, classics and modern languages, which are prey to the most gaping of educational disparities. Many state schools simply cannot offer them in depth, if at all. Access to musical instruments, orchestras, private tuition, Latin or Greek and overseas travel has remained a privilege rather than a universal opportunity. To treat these unequal starting points as evidence of unequal ability is to mistake years of private rehearsal for natural merit.

It is little surprise that battles over talent are intensifying at a time of declining levels of social mobility, widening wealth divides and an increasingly detached and powerful elite. Yet the profound generational opportunity divides we face seem beyond the scope of today’s politicians, many of whom would not now dare name, let alone challenge, a class system in which advantage and power are being systemically hoarded by elites.

In a world of spiralling living costs, and even despite the graduate jobs crisis, a coveted place at a top-tier university is still the golden ticket to the high-status jobs that can transform lives. For the vast majority of the population lacking serious wealth, it is one of the few routes left to the highly paid careers that may allow you to one day buy your own home – a diminishing prospect for generations growing up today.

The dials of opportunity are all pointing in the wrong direction – not least the gap in elite university enrolments between private and state schools. In truth, the most persistent admissions gap at Oxbridge is between a tiny cadre of top schools and the rest. In 2011, a Sutton Trust study found that four private schools and one sixth-form college sent more pupils to Oxford and Cambridge over three years than 2,000 schools and colleges across the UK. In 2018, a follow-up study concluded “little had changed”. Since then, there has been some progress on admissions statistics, but recent data shows regress at Cambridge – with the university scrapping targets for state school admissions in 2024, under a policy imposed by the Office for Students.

As Trinity Hall’s policy itself acknowledges, securing greater fairness in admissions is a crucial task. Universities would do well to look to some of the world’s top global companies, which are now ahead of the curve in the talent game. In my work with leading employers, from law firms to banks, professional services and tech companies, I’m seeing a decisive shift away from blunt diversity drives towards a more forensic examination of what talent looks like. Many diversity efforts have defaulted to identity tick-boxes, leaving untouched the class-based workplace practices that determine who is recognised as talented and who gets ahead.

This is the hard business case for social mobility: disentangling which traits genuinely drive performance and which are simply learned behaviours associated with privileged upbringing. In my book Cracking the Class Codes, co-authored with Anne-Marie Sim, out later this year, we set out the cultural markers that operate as hidden signals of talent and belonging in elite firms and universities. Confidence in interviews, fluency in abstract discussion, ease in challenging authority: these traits feel natural to those who possess them and are easily mistaken for innate ability. In reality, they are the accumulated product of years of advantage. This is about making expectations explicit, transparent and teachable for all employees, rather than leaving them as tacit codes benefiting a fortunate few.

Prestigious universities face exactly the same challenge. They can continue to select students already trained to succeed in their existing environments, or they can do the harder work of asking whether their environments themselves need to change to nurture all talents.

Doubtless, there is a case for making social class a legally protected characteristic, forcing institutions to confront discrimination more directly. But universities already have it within their power to design admissions systems that reward talent, irrespective of background. The test of a great university is not whether it attracts those already trained to succeed, but whether it can recognise and cultivate potential wherever it exists. At a time of deepening opportunity divides, that distinction has never mattered more.