Six years have passed since The Sutton Trust released its last Elitist Britain Report in 2019, but it’s looking like a case of plus ca change when it comes to education and the media.
It’s been a time of political and social turbulence at home and abroad including wars, a pandemic, a cost of living crisis, Liverpool finally winning the Premier League and five prime ministers. Racial diversity and inclusion leapt to the top of the agenda, before becoming subject of a “culture war,” while the 2024 General Election saw unprecedented political fragmentation, with many rejecting establishment parties on both the right and left.
Yet the report finds that across a range of sectors, the UK’s most powerful and influential people are still five times more likely to have attended private schools than the general population – among the whole UK population, seven per cent went to private schools while less than one per cent went to Oxbridge.
The media is no exception. Among 100 media leaders in the Sutton Trust’s “News Media 100” group, including editors, digital editors and lead broadcast presenters, 33% went to private school.
This is admittedly down from 43% in 2019 and 54% in 2014, when it was one of the highest figures across all industries in the Elitist Britain report (which include politics, business/wealth, public servants, creative industries and sport), but it’s still, well, quite high.
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Moving on to universities, 20% of media figures surveyed attended Oxbridge, and almost half went to a prestigious Russell Group university.
Elitist Britain 2025 explores the educational backgrounds of leading figures across the world of politics, media, business, charity, sport, creative and public sectors, and seems to suggest that little has changed since 2019.
In fact, the proportion of privately schooled leaders in some professions has actually increased, including FTSE100 chairs, cricketers, newspaper columnists and BBC executives, such as College of St Gregory the Great, Downside,Whitgift School and Selwyn College, Cambridge-educated director general Tim Davie. On the plus side, or not, online influencers and digital content creators are more likely to have been state educated than those in the traditional media.
Breaking down the figures more specifically, 50% of newspaper columnists in the report had attended public school, alongside 47% of political commentators, 38% of BBC executives, and 30% of journalists overall. At the other end of the spectrum, only 18% of influencers were rocking the old school tie.
Visit the dedicated Elitist Britain microsite to explore the data and read the research, or download the report in PDF form above.
