Where did 2024 MPs go to school and university?

Good morning. Keir Starmer has begun his premiership with a tour of the UK, in part as a symbol of his desire to “reset” relations with the devolved administrations.

Don’t forget the low politics of this: in 2026, Labour will face a difficult fight to keep control in the Welsh Assembly. The introduction of a proportional system is a boon to Reform UK, which has tended to do better in Wales than in England anyway. Nigel Farage’s party will hope that it will be able to repeat its rout of the SNP at Holyrood.

But it’s also a crucial part of Keir Starmer’s approach to leadership. When he was director of public prosecutions he put great store in going on listening tours and getting a sense of how the service he ran was operating across the country. As Labour leader he enjoyed getting out into the country and spending time at the coalface of public services — I remember a journey I took with Starmer when I was writing a profile of him in which we visited mental health facilities in Swindon, an activity he clearly enjoyed.

Something he likes a lot less is gladhanding MPs in Westminster, which may be a challenge given how he has to manage the egos and moods of 410 of them. Speaking of those 410 MPs — Georgina has very kindly been looking at some of the biographical details of the new parliament, which has given me some breathing space while I wrote my column, which is in today’s paper.

That’s what I go to school for

The most striking bit of election-related table talk this year has been a sense of despondency with politics and politicians — doubts that our representatives understand everyday struggles. Some friends are put off by what they see as a dismal gulf between politicians’ actions and the values that they purport to hold (stirring op-ed on that by Shahed Ezaydi in Stylist magazine). That general feeling of distrust prevails in the wider public, as recent research by the National Centre for Social Research reveals. To explore possible implications of a record low level of public confidence, one survey in the report put five statements to UK respondents to measure “populist attitudes”.

NatCen’s authors concluded:

The task facing the next government will not simply be to revive Britain’s stuttering economy and its struggling public services at a time when money is tight. It will also need to address the concerns of a public that is as doubtful as it has ever been about the trustworthiness and efficacy of the country’s system of government and the people who comprise it.

Amid this backdrop, MPs’ school/university backgrounds are publicly available factors that could shift a narrative of the “elite”, not least because a diverse breadth of experience means better informed policy decisions. Here are the top lines from the Sutton Trust analysis of all 2024 MPs, including the 344 elected for the first time:

• 63 per cent of MPs attended a comprehensive secondary school (compared with 88 per cent of the current UK school population), the highest proportion ever recorded

• 13 per cent attended a state selective (compared with 5 per cent in the UK)

• 23 per cent attended an independent school (compared with 7 per cent in the UK), down from 29 per cent of MPs at both 2019 and 2017 general elections

• One in five of the elected MPs went to Oxbridge (compared with only 1 per cent of UK public), while more than half attended Russell Group universities

• 90 per cent of MPs attended university (compared with 19 per cent for the wider British population)

• MPs from England were much more likely to have been privately educated than MPs from Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland

Almost half of all Conservative MPs in 2024 were educated at private school (Labour’s share was 15 per cent and it was 30 per cent for the Liberal Democrats). Again Tory MPs were more likely to have gone to Oxbridge (29 per cent) than Labour (19 per cent).

Taken together, the new educational profile of the Commons has tilted radically closer to that of the British public.

Private schooling is not a robust measure for socio-economic background, but the strong correlation with household income does tell us something. Only 1.7 per cent of private school pupils get their whole fees paid for by bursaries or scholarships, with just 5 per cent having more than half of their fees covered by financial support, according to the Independent Schools Council.

This map from the ISC, which represents 1,411 private schools, shows how they’re distributed across Britain:

The cross-section of society represented in the governing party also matters for the direction and priorities of its ministers. Among the Labour MPs elected following the 1945 Labour landslide, there were 39 former miners, 49 lecturers or teachers, eight housewives and 150 manual workers. Clement Attlee had drawn up a diverse cabinet; of his 26 members, 15 had been to state schools and only 10 to university — perhaps most famously, Aneurin Bevan, the founder of the NHS, had left school for the pits at age 13. Just two were Eton educated, compared with the nine in Winston Churchill’s cabinet, with a range of working backgrounds that helped propel the Labour government’s sweeping reforms.

Oxbridge still figures predominantly in Starmer’s cabinet, accounting for 40 per cent of appointees, according to the Sutton Trust (that compares with 45 per cent of Sunak’s cabinet in October 2022). The Labour leader completed his undergraduate at the university of Leeds, and his postgrad at Oxford. Only transport secretary Louise Haigh went to private school; comprehensives accounted for 92 per cent. Among the cabinets of both Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, one in five had gone to a comprehensive.

By contrast to Sunak’s cabinet, the pre-parliamentary experience of Starmer’s top team is balanced more evenly across the private, public and charity sectors, according to Pro Bono Economics.

Four times as many cabinet members under Starmer have previously worked for charities; Liz Kendall had been director of a charity for pregnant women, Wes Streeting had been head of education at Stonewall. The eight former charity campaigners in Starmer’s cabinet seem especially striking when you take the number of legislators in the 2024 parliament who worked in the third sector — Oxfam was the most common charity with which new MPs have had experience, with six MPs, followed by five at Save the Children and at Shelter.

Time will tell how this affects things like churn, the make-up of select committees, and of the MPs’ staff whom the new intake pull up with them. There is a long way to go; the next hurdle will be reducing the prohibitive costs of being selected and running for MP. But the significant shake-up of our politicians’ backgrounds in the past few decades is a critical achievement, particularly in a world where parties cannot take votes by certain groups for granted. It gives our government the confidence to engage in debates about social mobility and multiculturalism. Now Labour must step up to the challenge. 

Now try this

Journalist Aamna Mohdin explores her Somali family’s refugee experience across continents in her wonderful new book Scattered. I am excited to have my piece on Ru, which traces the path of a Vietnamese refugee to Canada, published in the upcoming essay collection Literary Journeys. Both books have stayed long with me (Georgina).

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