Wasted Talent

 Many kids at my comprehensive [school]were as talented as my peers at Balliol [Oxford University] but never got close to university. What I saw at Oxford was not the soft bigotry of low expectations but of entitlement: kids who lacked ability but had plenty of credentials (a very different thing) and contacts.

"One or two telephone calls are still necessary to find places for the borderlines," John Rae, the head master of Westminster School in the 1980s, admitted when talking about how he got so many pupils into Oxbridge. "Some lavish dinners for dons may have gone into preparing for those calls."

In his book Chums, Simon Kuper notes that Alec Douglas-Home was admitted to Oxford "practically as his birthright, got a third class degree and still went on to become prime minister, the third consecutive Etonian in the job".

Merit
Francesco Guardi (1712-1793)
Photo Credit: Walker Art Gallery {CC BY-NC]  

A version of this rigged system persists today: 7 per cent pf people are privately educated but make up 39 per cent of those in top jobs in the professions, while inherited wealth is just about the only way to get on the housing ladder or start a business. In journalism (if we're being honest) nepotism is rife even if people are too polite to mention it. This doesn't mean the beneficiaries lack talent but something far more sinister. It means that thousands of equally gifted youngsters from poorer backgrounds don't bother cultivating their talents because they know the door is closed,.

And this, I think, is heartbreaking. Indeed, it's an emergency for which nobody is sounding the alarm. I'm sick of the complacency of bang-average types convinced they're at the top on merit but whose every avenue of preferment was greased. Two thirds of senior judges went to private schools. A meritocracy? Do me a favour. I've met more talented labradors than some of those in wigs and gowns. Ditto the creative industries (a total stitch up: only 8 per cent from working class origins according to the Sutton Trust), FTSE chairs (9 per cent attended comprehensives), and vast parts of the media, City and senior civil service.

Let me be frank: the cronyism that holds the edifice of the British establishment in place (and which I've glimpsed from the inside) is a cancer. It is an anti-meritocracy with a self satisfied grin on its face.I have zero interest in self-harming, jealousy-inspired "solutions" such as VAT on private schools and higher taxes on employment. But I do believe to my core that our society would soar higher than ever before if we sliced through the Gordian knot of cosy internships, closed networks, "cultural screening" and the broader panoply of interlocking quid pro quos, mostly informal and therefore durable. But this is what appals me the most:almost nobody with political or cultural power these days is remotely interested in true meritocracy...

(Matthew Syed, The Sunday Times, 2026)

Identify educational talent early. Let there be national support given to specialist schools. Chetham's School of Music in Manchester is both a day and boarding school where pupils have an audition to gain entry. Fees are paid on the basis of parental income. Talent before money. Could not other establishments be funded in the same way for academic and technical subjects?