Who could have guessed that sharing a cabinet with Boris Johnson and David Cameron would leave a woman with a less than starry-eyed view of old Etonians?
But in fairness to Justine Greening, maybe she was referring strictly to the research evidence when she advised employers to look more sceptically on the CVs of public school boys. The former education secretary reportedly told a meeting in New York that faced with a choice between an old Etonian with three Bs at A-levels and someone from a struggling comprehensive with exactly the same grades, employers should realise that the former was “probably not as impressive”. Kids who do well against all the odds, in other words, are likely to be brighter than those who do well when offered every possible opportunity. The thinking behind such so-called “contextual recruitment” is that the context in which children achieve tells you almost as much as their raw results.
She was promptly accused of promoting discrimination against posh boys but performance at university certainly bears her argument out, with state school pupils doing better in their final degrees than applicants from private school. That’s one reason many leading universities now practise so-called “contextual admissions”, where a child’s social background is taken into account and may in some cases lead to a lower grade offer. Also, this week Ofsted’s Sir Michael Wilshaw praised the “foundation year” scheme at Oxford University’s Lady Margaret Hall college that seeks to recruit more students from under-represented backgrounds by putting them through an intensive catch-up year first. All are ways of allowing for the fact that, as Greening puts it, grades aren’t everything and context matters. But all in their time have been controversial, since one person’s contextual recruitment is another person’s class war on toffs.
The Independent Schools Council was quick to point out that going to fee-paying schools is no longer necessarily a guarantee of having grown up with a silver spoon in one’s mouth. Eton in particular is moving towards being needs-blind, or taking pupils based on their exam performance rather than parental ability to pay.
But Greening’s fundamental argument remains true, given the kind of backgrounds from which children who excel at 13 and are then put in for Eton entrance exams are disproportionately likely to come – not necessarily rich, but most likely highly engaged with their education. As a result, they will be given every chance to thrive during their GCSE and A-level years.
And yes, like the new home secretary Sajid Javid, Greening did go to a comprehensive school herself, a context that has clearly shaped her own career. She has spoken before about how she originally wanted to go into the City after university, but was sniffily rejected by a well-established bank who queried why she didn’t have the “world experience” offered by a gap year spent travelling; she was too embarrassed to admit she couldn’t afford one of those, and ended up becoming an accountant instead. The rest is history, right the way through to her resignation from cabinet after resisting Theresa May’s drive for more grammar schools, which Greening clearly felt was not the answer to social mobility. Context isn’t everything in life, but it isn’t nothing either. Greening has a point, and she shouldn’t be afraid to keep making it.
