Should Britain Abolish Private Schools?

WINDSOR, England—Nestled in a historic town across the river Thames from Windsor Castle, Eton College resembles a small city-state more than a high-school campus. It boasts hundreds of buildings, half a dozen museums and galleries, and a reputation for cultivating the who’s who of the British elite.

Current and former prime ministers, lawmakers and judges, and countless others who make up this country’s ruling class have walked through its doors. After all, to have graduated from Eton, or any of the other handful of Britain’s top, tuition-charging private educational establishments, is to be guaranteed lifelong membership in an exclusive echelon of a country where the school a person attends—even as early as the age of 13—correlates with wealth, power, and opportunity achieved in the years and decades after.

The privileges these schools afford aren’t cheap: It costs £42,501 ($51,504) to send a child to study and board at Eton each year—a price well above Britain’s average annual wage of £28,677. Though there are merit and needs-based scholarships, made possible by the school’s 400-million-pound endowment, only around 7 percent of the 1,300 boys who attend (Eton, like many other private boarding schools, is not coeducational) each year do so for free.*

Accessibility to schools such as Eton has long been an issue of concern, not least because of the dominance that private-school alumni tend to have over Britain’s top jobs. But the as the country’s prime minister—the 20th from Eton alone—has brought the issue back to the fore. While some view these schools as training grounds for the next generation of leaders and thinkers, critics regard them as bastions of entitlement and privilege. That of British lawmakers, including of Johnson’s cabinet, were privately educated—a rate four times that of the general population—has only furthered that perception. It has even prompted a national debate about whether these institutions should exist at all.