While only seven percent of UK schools are fee paying, nearly 60 per cent of cabinet ministers graduated one between 1922 and 2022. John Hogan and Sharon Feeney analyse at the disproportionate influence of elite educational institutions on UK politics, and make the case for why that leads to bad politics.
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The mid 2024 change of UK Government saw some shifts in the educational backgrounds of cabinet ministers there, as well as of the MPs more broadly. The Starmer Labour cabinet consists of only 4 ministers educated in public schools and 11 Oxbridge graduates. In terms of secondary schools, this is a significant change from the preceding Conservative administrations of Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak, wherein half of all cabinet ministers had been educated in private schools. That said, the percentage of current Labour cabinet ministers who graduated from Oxbridge is almost identical to the Conservative average between 2015 and 2024.
While fee paying secondary schools constitute only seven per cent of all UK secondary schools, they educated 59 per cent of cabinet ministers between 1922 and 2022.
We examined the education of the British cabinet over a century. Between 1922 and 2022, there were 479 British cabinet ministers. Of these, 425 were educated in 239 UK schools and 414 attended 64 UK universities.
Schools that educated cabinet ministers
While fee paying secondary schools constitute only seven per cent of all UK secondary schools, they educated 284 (59 per cent) cabinet ministers between 1922 and 2022. The top 10 secondary schools educating cabinet ministers during that century were all public schools and educated 147 (31 per cent) ministers (see Table 1). This overrepresentation is higher when examining individual schools such as Eton, that educated 67 (14 per cent) cabinet ministers alone. Only one of these schools is located outside of England (George Watson’s College, Edinburgh) and the rest are primarily to be found in the home counties.
Universities that educated cabinet ministers
Of the 169 universities in the UK, only 64 educated cabinet ministers between 1922 and 2022. The University of Oxford educated 157 cabinet ministers (33%) and the University of Cambridge 87 (18 per cent). Together, Oxford and Cambridge, sometimes referred to as “Oxbridge”, also educated 14 of the 21 prime ministers between 1922 and 2022. In 1992 John Major headed a Cabinet of 25, 19 of whom were Oxbridge alumni. Thirty years later, Rishi Sunak, a public school alumnus himself, became the 13th of the then 17 post-war British prime ministers to have studied at Oxbridge. His cabinet consisted of 22 ministers, 10 of whom attended Oxbridge. The other four ancient universities of the UK, those founded prior to 1600, the University of St. Andrews, University of Glasgow, University of Aberdeen and the University of Edinburgh, accounted for only 31 (6.4 per cent) cabinet ministers and 2 prime ministers – Andrew Bonar Law (1922-1923) who attended the University of Glasgow and Gordon Brown (2007-2010) who graduated from the University of Edinburgh – between 1922 and 2022. The top 10 universities educated 327 (68 per cent) cabinet ministers over the century examined (see Table 2), meaning that the other 54 universities educated the remaining 87 university educated cabinet ministers.
Oxbridge accounted for 75 per cent of cabinet ministers in 1922 and 45 per cent in 2022.
Concentrated presence in cabinet
In Figure 1 the presence of Oxford graduates in cabinet was regularly above 50 per cent between 1922 and 1997. Oxbridge accounted for 75 per cent of cabinet ministers in 1922 and 45 per cent in 2022. The presence of Oxbridge graduates fluctuated depending upon whether the Conservatives, or Labour, were in office. However, there was no change on this front following the 2024 election. Eton alumni had a strong presence in cabinet in the 20th century, however this declined following the turn of the 21st century. Nevertheless, graduates of private schools have been very overrepresented in cabinet. While the presence of private school alumni decreased from 73 per cent in the Major cabinet (1992-1997) to 25 per cent in Blair’s first administration (1997-2001), Figure 1 shows their presence increased in the following decades, reaching 64 per cent in Johnson’s 2020 Conservative cabinet. This only changed in 2024 with the Starmer administration, where private school alumni constitute 15 per cent of cabinet members. Yet, this level of representation is still twice that of private schools in the wider society.
Dangers of group think and bias
From the above it is clear that between 1922 and 2022 the British political elite suffered from an almost perennial problem of a lack of diversity – being drawn from the more wealthy and educated parts of society. Most cabinet ministers were educated in a small group of elite secondary schools and universities. This is not just a problem for those who believe in Diversity Inclusion and Equality for reasons of social justice and equality – but a uniform political elite is vulnerable to potentially damaging groupthink.
When children are educated in private schools, away from the children next door, they are no longer part of the community and never integrate properly with, or fully understand, the wider society. But, the private school education they (their parents) seek provides cachet, and networking opportunities that can provide access to high social strata and professional opportunities. These are institutions wherein economic capital seeks to ensure the reproduction of privilege, enabling dominant groups to purchase the best education for their children, all the while camouflaging their privilege as meritocracy. Even today students from private schools are overrepresented by a factor of seven when it comes to offers of places in Oxbridge.
When children are educated in private schools, away from the children next door, they are no longer part of the community and never integrate properly with, or fully understand, the wider society. But
Small group research has shown that groups with high levels of cohesiveness and conformity often produce decisions with suboptimal outcomes. Pressure towards uniformity, or groupthink, can result in decisions that fail to take account of important information, or consider alternatives. The similarity in the formation experience of an elite, an indicator of cohesion, may mean it lacks the richness of ideas diversity might bring. This is something Thomas and Verbeek pointed to when considering the ill-judged decisions made by the British cabinet during the Suez crisis in 1956. Nine members of Eden’s cabinet had been educated at Eton and the rest at other public schools, and all but two had graduated from Oxbridge – it was a very cohesive group of men from similar backgrounds.
Another concern is that elites may be biased in favour of in-groups.
There is also the issue of the representativeness of the political elite of the experiences in the general population. It is unhelpful if a governing elite is unfamiliar with the lived experiences of the governed. At one point two-thirds of David Cameron’s cabinet was made up of millionaires, while only 2 percent of the UK population were millionaires. In 1776 John Adams advocated that the legislature “should be an exact portrait, in miniature, of the people at large, as it should think, feel, reason and act like them.”
Another concern is that elites may be biased in favour of in-groups. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic it emerged that 1 in 5 UK government contracts, for personal protective equipment (PPE), valued at £4.1bn, were awarded to companies due to personal connections with members of the Conservative Party, some that stretched back through university and into private secondary schools. It was an example of networked cronyism in action, as friends and supporter were awarded lucrative contracts. 51 contracts went through a VIP contracts lane specifically for those with personal contacts with MPs, that the High Court subsequently found to be unlawful. This was in a context where the normal safeguards from corruption in the process of bidding for government contracts had been suspended.
The approach used to develop this post, as set out in our recent paper, utilizes tools, which can be employed by others, for quantitatively comparing different types of elite formation systems within, or between, countries, as well as within, or between, time periods.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of LSE British Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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