We Need to Talk About Class: Is It Time to Abolish Private Schools? (Sophie Pender)

0:00Amol Rajan:This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. How has America shaped the world? I'm Asma Khalid, host of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. As the United States marks its 250-year anniversary, we've been exploring the surprising and often hidden ways the US has shaped the modern world. And today on the show, we answer your questions about this moment and what to expect in the years to come. From the BBC, it's the United States at 2.50. Listen to the global story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:39Amol Rajan:Before we start this week's episode, a little personal note from me. This is actually my final episode of Radical. Well, my final conversation on Radical. We'll still have the Q &A episode on Monday. And next week, we're going to have a best of Radical so far. Radical is going to continue. I'm going to continue elsewhere. I'm not retiring. You'll still be able to find me in all the usual places. But this is my final conversation on Radical. It has been just the most enormous privilege to have all of these conversations with such smart and influential and thoughtful and powerful and just interesting guests.

1:16Amol Rajan:And also to get your thoughts, your questions, your insight each week. I'm so honestly, I'm just so humbled at the amazing response that we've had from you to this podcast. not just the sheer numbers listening, but the depth of your engagement. Thank you so much for all the time that you've given to Radical. And if I may say thank you to all of the brilliant people on the other side of the glass who I've worked with, who've produced this show in such a fantastic way. There are going to be more episodes of Radical coming soon, but I wanted to finish the last of my conversations with a really special guest.

1:45Amol Rajan:You're going to hear about her in just a moment. And we're going to talk about an issue which I think you know by now is a huge passion of mine. I think it lies behind so many others when we think about modern Britain, and that is this slightly slippery concept of social mobility. Who gets the chance to get on and why? That's going to be our subject on this, my last normal episode of Radical.

2:15Amol Rajan:hello it is amol here welcome to radical these conversations about the deep local national and global trends changing our world and offering you and our guests a safe space to submit some radical ideas for the future this week we're ending my run of conversations on radical with an absolute cracker. It's Sophie Pender, the founder and chief executive of the 93 % Club. The 93 % Club takes its name from the overwhelming majority of people in Britain who went to state school. In spite of that majority, Sophie argues that most of our powerful institutions still feel calibrated to a much smaller, privately educated world, and that the benefits of private schools for those who went to them go far beyond who gets the best teaching.

3:03Amol Rajan:As the old saying goes, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And Sophie decided while she was at Bristol University that if you can't beat them, you join them. What began as a student society, really a little network on Facebook for her mates, is now a huge and growing nationwide network of state-educated students and professionals offering support, mentoring and connections. She's trying to flip the script. She's trying to rewrite it, using networking to help that 93 % of the country increase their representation in the UK's top professions. She's taking pretty radical steps to try and accelerate social mobility, but she thinks we've often defined social mobility too narrowly as an exceptional individual escaping their background and making it into elite systems and networks and professions.

3:52Amol Rajan:She wants us to be much more ambitious, and ambition is a big theme of what we're about to discuss, And she wants us to question why anyone should have to move to leave their community and tone down their identity and their accent, their personality to be successful. She says, why not change this system, the institutions instead? So Sophie wants to challenge the two tier education system that separates children so early to build a country where talent doesn't need the right postcode or connections to thrive. That raises some very uncomfortable questions. Can a country with private schools ever be truly meritocratic?

4:28Amol Rajan:Should social mobility mean joining the establishment or changing it? And can Britain create a fairer system without asking people to give up the advantages that they have inherited? Before we begin, just a quick reminder. On Monday, Sophie's answering your Radical Questions, the bonus episodes which you have driven so brilliantly. Thank you for all of the questions that you have submitted to us. We appreciate it so much, as do our guests. and just to say if you subscribe to Radical on BBC Sounds, you will get a notification each time it drops. Now, on to this week's episode of Radical with Sophie Pender.

5:05Amol Rajan:Okay, let's do it. Sophie Pender, what's going on? How are you? I'm all right. So I'm feeling nervous. I'm feeling nervous. Why are you feeling nervous? Well, I felt like we could co-host this show. Sure. Not the show, this episode. Straight in with a job application, literally in the first sentence. Yeah, it's on its way out, guys. Is that one of the things you've learned from the 93 % Club, how to apply for jobs before people have even got ready to work out what they think? Okay, so that's a future. Okay, so in future when we're co-hosting a podcast, this will all sound very different. Why are you nervous?

5:33I think that the topic that we're talking about inspires a lot of emotion in people, positive and negative. So I feel the weight of the responsibility to do it justice. And also, you're one of the people early on that radicalized me in inverted commas.

5:51Amol Rajan:I radicalized you? Yeah, so when you did your How to Crack the Class Ceiling program, I was actually in the background of episode two of that. So I was a junior lawyer when you were going to talk to people in the city about class. And I'd listened in on those conversations and I thought, hmm. And I've since left my legal career, obviously. To go full-time to the 93 % Club. So How to Crack the Class Ceiling was a two-part documentary. which was about social mobility in this country which is a subject you're interested in and I'm interested in and this podcast is interested in and you might even say is an arena that requires some pretty radical ideas I'm nervous for a couple of reasons one because I don't think I've ever had a guest on this show that I feel like I've known more about in advance and been interested to see whether or not reality matches expectations as I'm sure it will but also because this is my last conversation on Radical and we've done over 50 episodes and we've had some of the smartest people in the world, you know, incredible people and we've chosen to end with Sophie Pender and you now dedicate your life to one of the great passions of my life and of this podcast, which is, well, what is it?

7:04Amol Rajan:Is it social mobility? Is it poverty? Is it inequality? Is it opportunity in Britain? What do you call it? Do you know what? I feel like I'm almost overstimulated with the use of the word social mobility. there are some days that I wake up and I think if I never hear the word social mobility again it it will it might make me the happiest day of my life because I feel like it's almost it's almost lost its meaning in a way it's a slippery concept and also no one goes into the pub and goes hey um hey Tom Tom how do you feel about social mobility yeah and I almost wonder if it's also become like a form like you know I grew up in a very working class background and we'll talk about that but I was you know I was like oh I'm a product of social mobility and I come from a Socio-economic background.

7:46And I do wonder sometimes, and this is just the cynic in me over the years, is have we used this language now to almost remove conversations around class and make it almost more difficult to realise that we still have a class problem in this country? Because class is uncouth and it's not good to talk about class. But we can talk about social mobility.

8:05Amol Rajan:Just tell us a bit about the origins of Sophie Pender. So I think I'll start with my parents. so my mum who's called Sarah one of 14 oh I didn't sorry I'm going to start I'm going to start I can rein it in Catholic she's one of 14 wasn't your dad one of my dad's one of 11 my mum's one of 13 incredible so I mean when you were growing up did you think that was normal well I had it was abnormal in my regard because of my dad's 11 and my mum's 13 both were the only people that came to the UK so we had a massive family in India. So I had a massive, I've still, yeah, I've got over 40 cousins, but they're in India.

8:47Amol Rajan:So we were kind of the weird, the sort of UK exception, but so it wasn't as normal. It would be normal in a different way for you. Yeah. I mean, I thought it was normal. So my mum was the youngest of 14, so I've got a massive family. My dad, do you know what? I think he was the youngest of five, but I think the fact that I can't even properly tell you that probably tells you about the relationship there um he his family came over from Ireland and my dad had a very troubled upbringing um he was homeless by age 15 there's a lot of violence in his family and Irish heritage is super interesting because you see a lot of intergenerational trauma so um there's a lot of alcoholism in my family my dad became an alcoholic um and he was a drug addict uh my mom obviously well he became an alcoholic slightly later in in life when my parents split up but when they were together and I was born he was very much he would take drugs but he would also deal drugs I was born in Graham Park council estate which is one of the biggest council estates in North London where in North London is this very roughly it's in Mill Hill right so it's funny right you see you hear mill hill and you think oh yeah night there's a posh area with a nice gales um you know great yeah exactly so gray and park council estate is where i was born um you know we had a giant german shepherd because my dad was the drug dealer on the estate and so you you weren't really and i was really young at this age right so i was i think it was i grew up there probably zero to four before we moved to the next council estate so your parents were together when you were born yeah how old were you when they split up i was about six when they split up and did they split up partly owing to your your dad's alcoholism and drug involvement no well i mean i'm sure that played a part well i did it play a part of it i don't know it was affairs so um my dad had an affair with a 17 year old right so yeah really like and and you kind of when you're your parents do try to keep these facts from you but they are also ultimately human too and so you do witness a lot especially when you're an only child and you're kind of watching your parents war with each other um so they split up when I was six and then there was a period where my dad sort of you know transferred from alcohol sorry drug addiction to alcoholism so he would use speed and you know drugs that when you weren't taking but when you were taking them you were like lovely and charismatic and you know he was like the life and soul of the party but the minute it wasn't available it was you know that he was very violent um and so you know was mostly violent against my mum but there were definitely times where you know I remember on my seventh birthday um going to ring the the doorbell it was I remember I was in a little blue dress and I had a badge it was on my seventh birthday and he wasn't there he wasn't in his flat and my mum was like where is he and he was round his mate's house who was also on drugs and um he came out the house and he tried to pull me out the car and he you know he was like I'm going to take her to Ireland you're never going to see her again so you know at six years old I'm being like pulled from pillar to post from in these two different worlds with my mum who is you know ultimately human and she's she's fallen in love with someone who is ultimately incredibly flawed and my dad who is I think objectively on paper probably people would say a pretty bad bloke but if I'm being empathetic about that you know if you look at his childhood he was incredibly traumatized and so it's intergenerational and yeah um he died when you were also pretty young right when i was 12 so there was there was a period where after that incident happened and he tried to take me my mom got restraining order so he wasn't allowed to come anywhere near me or my mom um so there was a period where i didn't see my dad for a number of years um and then um I got a phone we we'd started to reconnect and I saw my auntie in a shopping mall which was really weird I was in Harrow and she was just she was just there walking in front of me my dad's sister and she gave me my dad's number and I think I was I was 11 and so I just started secondary school and you kind of feel like an adult right and I was like I kind of don't need to go through my mum anymore in this situation um and maybe I also grew up really fast because of what happened to me and I remember we were we were texting backwards and forwards but we never really properly rekindled the relationship and then I got a call from well my mum got a call from my auntie saying Richard which was his name he yeah he's in hospital and he's not going to make it and basically he had the details of it were unclear but his liver had basically totally packed in and the toxins had gone through his entire body and he was in a vegetated state so the last time I saw my dad he died very slowly um over about two weeks but his liver had packed in and the reason why I say it was unclear that how you know how the circumstances of his death is that and this actually coincided with me going to psychotherapy was that about 10 years later and I didn't realize this existed I was at university and I got these possessions from my dad my dad didn't have a lot you know I remember asking for his shoes um to remember him by because he was all the same trainers and he didn't have any possessions so actually he needed to be buried in the shoes because he didn't have any other shoes and so I didn't realize these things existed and it was photographs but it was also a letter and my dad had left a 20-page letter um where he at the start um well he spoke about his life and his upbringing and the fact that he had been subjected to violence as a child and the fact that he never really got encouraged in education and all of these different things but really broke my heart I think is and I received this when I was yeah about 20 and what really broke my heart about it was in the front page of the letter he wrote something along the lines of it's taken me this many years in my life to realize that you can't put the blame on everyone else for the circumstances that you find yourself in and i think it's a common thing in alcoholics anonymous that they get you to take accountability they also sprinkle a little bit of religion in there as well but they get you to take accountability for your actions and so i was reading this letter where on the one hand he's saying i take accountability this is all my fault and then i'm reading this letter where he hasn't sort of chance yeah of course and I realized at that I realized at that point I was like and I think this is why I feel so icky about social mobility now which is who am I to tell you know if social mobility is great right if you happen to be the exception and you break through the car ceiling if you're not that person who am I to tell you that it's your fault when I'm reading this letter and I've got my dad who died thinking that the circumstance of his life were his fault and at the same time I'm reading a letter which basically says that he never stood a chance and I think at that point it was a real turning point for me where I was like I need to the way that I'm viewing the world right now is not it.

16:11So young Sophie responds to

16:13Amol Rajan:this extraordinary turmoil, death of your dad, going to a pretty tough school by getting three A stars, by being the first person in your family to go to university, by getting into Bristol to do law, is it? I did English, actually. Did English? Oh, my God, shocking degrees. Do you know what? It's so funny, because I know one of your other guests, Joe Seddon, said that English literature is one of the degrees that we should say that has to have a health warning on it. I'm pretty confident that I came out of university earning a lot more than Joe Seddon did. Ooh! A little bit of interradical rival.

16:49Amol Rajan:There's one for you, Joe. Joe, feel free to be in touch. Do you know Joe because of his work in social media? Yeah, of course. Okay, so Joe, Joe... I did text him when I heard that saying... Do you write a reply from Joe Seddon? Joe Seddon, legend, former guest, founder of a tech platform called Zero Gravity. He's the one who came on this podcast and said geography is destiny. So you go to Bristol, and Bristol is a university which at the time has, what, 60 % state-educated and 40 % privately-educated people. And young Sophie is in this new city and there's a lot of posh people around. And a lot of indie people as well.

17:21Amol Rajan:And a lot of indie people, yeah, kind of like cool, kind of hippie types. So you get to uni and you're like, okay, I think I should sort of try and do something to kind of get together the other people who, like me, are in the 93 % of the population that actually went to a state school. Not for the first couple of years. Like, I was not born like a class warrior. I did not, you know, when you're... You're a convert. Yeah, convert class. I'm very proud class warrior um I was not when you grow up working class I I always believed that activism was the preserve of the privileged because you can afford to be gluing yourself to something if you know that you're gonna be bailed out right if I said boo to a goose I'm losing my job like what safety net do I have to fall back on and I know that some of the greatest activists of our time haven't actually come from privilege but when you think about activists in the modern age like you know i don't have the data on it but anecdotally a lot of the people that i met at bristol who are activists were also incredibly rich so i started uni knowing that i wanted to become a corporate lawyer by the way not human rights or anything a corporate lawyer because you wanted to be rich yeah yeah i was like well i know that well when my dad died he didn't even leave me his shoes and i know that i've got no inheritance because my mum lives in a council house i'm not going to get any any of that good wealth transfer so you said yes so instinctively there do you think some people who grow up poor feel ashamed about saying that they want to get rich i think people like british people in general like make it shameful to talk about money one of my first experiences at uni was being shamed by someone for talking about money or asking them how much money they had which wasn't a thing because like my mates when we were growing up we would always spot each other we all have part-time jobs and at different points we would get paid so like one of my mates was paid spotting so that means you let you lend a bit of money right spotting is not a spotting is like talent spotting like a model yeah spotting is like let me a fiver because i'm a bit short this week yeah so we yeah so sorry we would lend each other money until the other person got paid and you say can you spot me this um and it was for silly things like going to the cinema or nando's uh nando's opened up on our high street best day of my life and so we would always ask each other how much the other person had in our bank account and it would kind of be like a bit of a joke because the answer would probably be like two quid or a fiver and i remember in my first week of uni in freshers we were all sat around and we were all like asking questions like what did you do with your summer obviously the question of what school did you go to came up constantly we were going around the circle and this girl who was super posh um I didn't hold that against her just you know it's just a oh yeah she's a bit posh she was talking about us this girl was 18 and she was talking about the safari she'd gone on and I was like and she basically had said that her parents give her an allowance and she had used that allowance for the safari.

20:05And I was like, wow, that's amazing. How much allowance do your parents give you? And oh my God, it was like I'd shot her. You could hear a pin drop and she was like, has no one ever taught you any manners? Has no one ever taught you that you don't talk about money? That's very uncouth.

20:23Amol Rajan:It is such a thing, the difference in the readiness and preparedness of people from different class backgrounds to talk about money. And I guess part of it, I don't know, why would there be as a cultural idea, why would it be that people who've got money, so you don't talk about money because it's uncouth, whereas people who don't have money, who think all day, every day about money because they need to get to the end of the week, are willing to do it. For sure. And I do wonder, again, I feel like I was not a conspiracy theorist, by the way. Like I said, grew up working class, kind of believed all this sort of the system's out to get us.

20:58It's kind of like we're kind of all bought into capitalism. It's unfair. That's life. and that's kind of like where I was at. But I do think doing this work full time now that it's a tactic of wealthy people to make us all feel ashamed about talking about money because if we all openly spoken about it, we'd realise how much they've actually got. So I don't know when you just sort of take a beat.

21:20Amol Rajan:And it opened up the question about whether or not they're worth it. Yeah, like is that fair? I don't know. But you were open about you wanted to be a corporate lawyer and indeed you were a corporate lawyer for five years. How did you find that? Money was great. Money was really good. I mean, I'm a workaholic. So, I mean, when you're having to juggle as many things as I'm juggling, age 16, I think it alters your, like, neuron path so that you have to constantly be busy. When you've not had money and then you have some money. By the way, this is not, you weren't buying yachts. You just had, like, a decent wage for a mid-20s something.

21:53Amol Rajan:It's fantastic. And do you know the best, the single best thing about money is not having to worry about not having money. Yes. It's amazing. And people just don't, it's like, it's just so nice not to have to worry about it. So you're a corporate lawyer in a swanky office. Well, I wasn't in a swanky office, actually. I got given the office that had no windows. Okay, so you had a rubbish office. Not everyone did have no windows, though. But for the first time, and law, one of the things we got into with the documentaries, which you very kindly mentioned, is that law as a profession skews richer.

22:24Amol Rajan:If you look at the proportion of judges, for instance, at the very top, who are from private school backgrounds, it skews much more posh for lots of reasons to do with history, the fact that the legal profession has got this kind of Hogwarts kind of architecture, very beautiful architecture, which is quite forbidding. There's a vernacular. There's how you address people. There's a jargon. There's how you actually dress yourself. Law puts up a lot of barriers to people from poor backgrounds. How did you feel confronting those barriers? Well, it's interesting that you say about the Hogwarts-y stuff because one of my, when I was a junior lawyer and I had a trainee, he went to Eton and he obviously knew the stuff that I would do.

23:04So we'd have interesting conversations about it. And I asked him just quite bluntly, I was like, you know, I obviously have all these theories about what goes on behind closed doors. What are your thoughts on it? And he said at Eton, they tell us from quad to quad to quad. So at Eton, they have a quad and a quad is that little patch of grass.

23:24Amol Rajan:It's a place with four sides, yeah? Yeah, four sides. If anyone confused what a quad is. Yeah, yeah, that's it. And then you go to the quads of Oxbridge, because Oxbridge has quads. Yeah. And then you go to the quads of the Barrister's Chambers, because Barrister's Chambers also have quads. And there's some really, you could do some really interesting analysis on the architecture of private schools in this country, and how they mimic our top institutions, and how people feel in those rooms. What was the ambition of the 93 % Club when you started it, and what's the ambition now? the ambition when i started was just to make some mates to be honest like it was a facebook group but i was i was kind of tired of being called a chav um like my accent now like the way that i present and that my accent now is very different to when i was at university and if you meet my friends and my family i sound totally different to them and part of that actually is when i started at the law actually when i did my training contract interview for one of the firms the interviewer wouldn't start the interview with me because i wouldn't pronounce my t's so i think and i kind of but i think i was like do you want some water or even like maybe it's even like water and he was i mean water and he was like should we try that again and he actually took a beat should we try that again yeah he took a beat and wanted me to properly pronounce my words before he continued.

24:46Amol Rajan:Okay, I've got to be a bit careful here. But one of the central points of that two-part documentary, How to Crack the Class Ceiling, and this will get us into accent. I do want to find out what the ambition of the 93 % Club is now. But one of the central things was about accent bias. And I think I've mentioned this podcast before. The response to the documentary convinced me that accent paranoia is a much bigger part of being British than accent pride. So when How to Crack the Class Ceiling came out, It featured a young man called Chris. I use his name, though his name's actually changed since then, because he featured in the documentary.

25:18Amol Rajan:And he's got a very strong Hull accent. Obviously, he went to university, I think, in York, and went back to Hull, which is not that far away. And his family felt he betrayed them by changing his accent because he sounded so much posher. Didn't sound that posh to me, and I come from South London. And he basically was so paranoid and crippled by his accent that he just didn't have the confidence at university. So hilariously, when I met him at the start of that documentary, he'd been watching YouTube videos about how to say watermelon. And he couldn't say the turt in water. And the response to that documentary, I swear down, I got 100, maybe 1 ,000 messages from people pouring their heart out, saying I got to be chief constable.

25:58Amol Rajan:So I got to work at Avon and Somerset Police, but I grew up in Dudley in the black country. I didn't make it chief constable because of my accent. And all these people would just say, my accent held me back, my accent held me back. You say you've now changed it for reasons we'll get into. But you, did you consciously change it when you got into the law firm? Because you were like, if I'm going to get on, I need to code switch it. I think it just gets beaten out of you. Just do. Honestly, it gets beaten out of you. Just having a bit of osmosis, yeah. Yeah. To be honest, that's my experience on Radio 4.

26:25Amol Rajan:Yeah. Yeah. And I think you look back at, you know, there's like old videos of myself when I was in school and you sound different. I went back to go see my old sixth form teacher, Miss McFerrin, big up. And she was like, yeah, you sound different. different and it was other things as well like because you're from from an irish background i also spoke really fast so i had to slow down so we're the same person so i have to slow down i have to try so hard i write on a piece of paper slow the f down every time also your brain also probably your brain's going oh so i'm excited there's an annoying politician being stupid in front of me and i'm like i don't want to have to slow down because you're being annoying um but also i used to come from a place called tooting from south london i am from and i grew up in tooting i'm pretty sure now when i'm on radio for and i don't do it consciously because i try to avoid the conscious thing which is a conscious something but i end up saying i come from two ting why did you decide to leave corporate law to go full-time with the 93 club what's the ambition of the 93 club now ambition the 93 club is to effectively make private schools redundant big ambition yeah i know the lobby are going to come come for me i think private schools are the biggest conspiracy in this country and i say that because i've been involved in so many conversations on social mobility my ears are bleeding from talking about social mobility and yet we do not talk about them enough and if you look at the history of potential reform of private schools in this country you will see time and time again people going oh that doesn't that doesn't look very unfair that doesn't look very fair going to reform it being squashed by effectively the elites again to reiterate i think i'm quite a pragmatic like kind of center center left person this is the one issue where i go we all collectively losing our minds on this can you not see what i see can you not and that's what bothers me i go to conferences about how do we make education fairer and no one talks about private schools no it's it's like honestly I thought I was going in insane and actually so part of the reason why I ended up going full-time 93 % club was I think that I'm sick to death of mentoring programs and schemes and all of these like these different things that we like come up with to make ourselves busy and no systemic change is actually happening how is the 93 % club in a practical way going to achieve your mission of making private schools redundant what are you doing what do you do at the club so 93 % club is a membership organization and obviously earlier I said the mission is to try and make private schools redundant but implicit in that is that in order to make them redundant we need to make sure that state schoolers have the same social networks as what private schools do right because if you look at state schools and private schools you actually get incredible educational outcomes in a lot of state schools like there are some state schools out there think about places like Brampton Manor in East London I think absolutely smashing it what private schools do really well is what uh your the in the book they describe as positional advantage so they have obscene resources and so many of those resources are invested in making sure that private schoolers not only have 50 different olympic size swimming pools and football pitches but actually they have incredible networks in the city that they can tap up and the idea of the old boys network and the old girls network is actually a really long established feature of private schools so we're building effectively it's a bit it's literally like i'm literally copying the private schools it's really not people think you need to reinvent the wheel and i thought to myself well they're doing it really well why don't i just copy them and the way it works is that a student of mine say for example they want to get into the bbc or they want to get into i don't know one of the other broadcasters they can go on the platform look at our membership directory and just directly message them it's really simple it's an alumni network so what's the problem that you're trying to solve and before you answer that a 2025 report from the sutton trust which is a charity that does a lot on inequality and poverty and social mobility with that wherever that is so the private school alumni are five times more likely to get a top job than state school leavers i want to also just quickly mentioned in this context that an amazing academic at LSE who featured in my documentary is called Professor Sam Friedman, not to be confused with another Sam Friedman who works in and around government.

30:56Amol Rajan:Nightmare. Talked about, yeah, nightmare for them. Talked about how basically he's done a lot of work on this. He's written a fantastic book called The Class Ceiling. Talks an awful lot about how it's not just about getting in, it's about getting on. So if you look at elite professions, when state schoolers do manage to get in, sometimes because of attempts to open up recruitment, they still might struggle they might get in the lower levels but they might struggle to get on what is the problem that the 93 club is trying to address so this is the key thing is why i talk about private schools rather than social mobility don't get me wrong i have had so we're we're a charity so we have had funders in the past reject us with no real uh reason behind other than saying oh we don't think this is a big enough issue but then they will fund similar organizations we've even had feedback that if we spoke less about state and private schools which felt a bit on the nose and spoke more about social mobility they'd feel more comfortable so being explicit about your desire to abolish private schools has come at a cost to you yeah absolutely i mean the amount of abuse i get talking about the subject as well is absolutely insane what kind of abuse do you get i had to go to the police so i get if i mean you know there's there's always trolling but i have people from the private school lobby obsessively watching my social media and talking about it amongst themselves and then I got two very threatening emails not from the private school lobby I should say but from people who were against the stuff that so I've not made life easy for myself I've gone from six-figure salary in corporate law firm thinking I'm going to be I'm going to be partner I'm going to be kushed I'm going to you know get myself on the housing ladder to doing this full time because I genuinely believe that this is one of the biggest social ills that we allow in this country.

32:44Amol Rajan:What is that social ill? So just to set the scene on the private and state school problem and a lot of this you can see in the books that you mentioned so the thing about private schools is that the private school lobby which is the ISC, Independent Schools Council, will spend a lot of time convincing you that private schools are full of children who are from parents who just really love their children and work really hard and sacrifice a lot to send their kids there. But actually, when you look at the income distribution, when you get to the top 30 % of earners, you see a huge hockey stick. So essentially, you've got the first thing to understand is that the makeup of private schools is predominantly the wealthiest people in society who are sending their kids there.

33:28And there's no real influence of working class kids there. So you've got a real concentration of one group of people. They then, on top of that, get obscene levels of resources, which make it almost impossible to fail. So not only do you get already affluent kids getting additional benefits that state school kids don't get, you also get, to be blunt, children who are being overqualified beyond their intrinsic ability. It's impossible to fail. And so much of the data that you came up with in your documentary showed that if you're a working class student with a first you are less likely to end up in a top job than a middle class student with a tutu which indicates that something's going wrong there right that there's a there's a there's a private schools are doing something else

34:11Amol Rajan:beyond education and credentialism which is allowing people to climb up the pole exactly and actually a lot of the research shows that yes while some private schools do have better education facilities private you don't actually need an education degree to be a to be a private school teacher and that's not to say that you know an education degree automatically makes you better but you can't kid me because a lot of my best friends through going to university and law school came from private schools and they said to me actually a lot of our teachers were you know they weren't very good so there's something else that's going on there beyond just the pure education and so then you've got a situation where you've got a bunch of really wealthy kids you've then got obscene resources so even if you take the most affluent state school in the country right and actually there's not a huge amount of discrepancies between state school spending you take the most affluent state school in the country and the poorest private school on average you're still going to see a spending discrepancy ratio of three to one so for every one pound spent on a state schooler three pounds is spent on a private schooler so then you've got that situation but that three pounds isn't from the government necessarily is it it's not but the point is the parents of those people yeah so the way that private schools make their money predominantly is through the parents and they've got some endowments as well because some of them charities but actually that's a little bit of a red herring because it's not but it's a taxpayer money it's not the case that private school kids get three times as much as state school kids no but the point is the resources right so it's not yeah but the capital going there exactly but the taxpayer also does subsidize private schools even after the vat change even after the vat change because some of them are charities so they do so some of the business reliefs were removed but actually um you know if someone makes it i think rishi sunak made like a hundred grand donation to his school you know you can get gift aid on that the taxpayer is ultimately paying for that so you've got a resource gap there which is huge right so that compounds that privilege and then you've got a very sophisticated alumni network and a brand that fully follows these students around which basically says if you come from these schools there's an automatic obligation to help one another and that's very different to state schools because when you go of given the impression that you have succeeded in spite of your school and you don't really give it a huge amount of credit I became very resentful of my school and my family and so I didn't really want to help them didn't really want anything to do with them and I wasn't going back and helping the next generation so that leads to a brain drain right so social mobility takes exceptional individuals out of their communities and you're left with a situation where you've got this brain drain in working class communities

36:51Amol Rajan:I hope you're enjoying this conversation with the incredible Sophie Pender. If you are, please subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds and turn your push notifications on. That way you'll never miss an episode of Radical, including the bonus Q &A where I put your questions to her about class, privilege, networking and education. Thank you so much. And now back to Sophie Pender.

37:17Amol Rajan:so the independent schools council which you mentioned the isc um not in the room uh and not here they're always in the room they're in this room uh they tend to be the room more broadly they're not here to defend themselves and i'm going to channel some of the arguments that i imagine they would put to you and perhaps already um have uh given you the privilege of engaging with the first is um just being realistic about this country's resources and the way we arrange spending in this society that we have if you took that seven percent and put them in the state sector there would be an additional cost which is huge you're questioning that and they would say as the parents often say the parents of people who send their kids to private schools would say they're paying twice they pay through general taxation for their for the sophie penders and and others to go state school and they pay to send their kids to the best um uh schools in the country and therefore there's less pressure on the state system isn't that less pressure on the state system a very valuable saving well i think you know if we were just logical about this i think there's less pressure on the state system we wouldn't be on this in the situation if that seven percent really were relieving the state system i don't think we'd be in the situation we're in is the first point but i think they calculated they save the the uh the state system about i think four billion but actually when you think about the education budget that would lead to an increase of about 4 % in the education budget if we had to absorb the 7%, which actually, when you break it down, is about less than a penny in the pound for the taxpayer.

38:46Amol Rajan:Second argument the IOC might put you. On that point, though, because they love this point of we're helping the taxpayer, I think there is definitely also something that is neglected in this argument. One, we know that these families come from the wealthiest earners in the country. And as someone who was a corporate lawyer and has spent a lot of time with very wealthy people, there is a very strong relationship between wealthy families who can spend as much they can on these private school fees and having very smart lawyers and accountants that structure their affairs in such a way to pay minimal tax and I have never met a private school parent who sent their children to private school because they were so worried about relieving the state sector my other rebuttal to that would be we are in a situation where this country's growth is stagnating and we are time and time again talking about we've got a neat crisis what a million people out a million great obsession it's yeah you've done how many documentaries about class i'm constantly talking about class there's so many programs popping up we've been trying to deal with this issue for years state schools have been squeezed with their spending well the iic if they're here forgive me for channeling them again i might continue to do would say that the neats crisis is not connected to the fact that we've got private schools in this country.

40:00Amol Rajan:We've got a million, I mean, it's extraordinary. Trust me, I'm obsessed with this. A million young people the age of 16 to 24 out of work not in education, employment, training. That's not to do with private schools. That's to do with other things. But they would also say, you, Sophie Pender, must acknowledge that all policies, all radical changes come with trade-offs. There will be trade-offs if you abolish private schools tomorrow. By the way, is your plan to abolish private schools in one fell swoop? Is that what you'd like? Why not? Okay. It's radical, no? Okay, it's radical. it is radical but I don't think it'd be realistic in one fell swoop right but you'd need to I would be pro a policy where we say okay from this point we're no longer accepting new children and we phase them out phase them out okay all policies are trade-offs what are the losers from yours lower grades why do we assume it's a levelling down to go to state school right and if people assume it's a levelling down to go to state school then why is that okay for the rest of us true but I mean I just don't understand that other than other than other than having to find the money to be able to put all these people who are in the 7 % of schools into the state sector, what are the other costs from your, what are the other price, what's the other price you're willing to pay other than taking a lot of political heat and getting a lot of threats?

41:09Amol Rajan:Do you accept that some people, some people in the short term might get lower grades? But why are they going to get lower grades? We're assuming that people who are working class and in state schools get lower grades. Like I said, there are many, I mean I got three stars. They're automatically, and also So let's be clear. I think the other thing that I didn't mention about why in particular, do you know what? There's a huge argument to say that private schools are unfair and people pretend it's not a zero sum game. But for every advantage a private schooler gets, that's someone that you've spoken to before who's missing out on that opportunity.