Happygardening, I couldn't agree more about the race to the bottom that some posters seem to want.
I think most people have forgotten that student teachers who do a PGCE usually pay for their own training and take on debts to cover their cost of living during what is an extremely challenging year. Some teachers in independent schools and academies do not have QTS. Any professional development they do will be paid for by the school that employs them.
To the poster who mentioned a careers fair, I simply don't believe you. It is far more likely that the school careers department invited pupils who had recently left to come back and talk about their university and subject. On the whole, independent schools have to organise school trips to universities or suggest pupils and parents go under their own steam because universities don't come to them.
Universities work very hard to widen access and it is disingenuous to suggest otherwise without proof. I have found quite a few state sector colleagues to be militantly unhelpful about remaining on school premises more than 30 minutes after the end of the school day for any more than their contracted maximum number of evenings. As these tend to be taken up with parent-teacher consultations, it can make running events like careers evenings unnecessarily challenging.
There has also been fabricated nonsense about some sort of mysterious network that is accessible only to the privately educated and that provides them with a secret pass into all sorts of prestigious jobs. It sounds like the Masons or something akin to a Harry Potter world in which state school kids are stuck being Muggles. I have never seen any evidence of this. There are private school children with successful relatives in a position to give their own child a leg up, but I am sure that there are children at state schools who have the luck of a family link into a career too. There are also plenty o private school kids who enter careers they have no links to because they have been taught well, concentrated in lessons and achieved the results needed - something anyone at a good state school is able to do.
The issue has always been how to lift the kids from deprived backgrounds into a position to benefit from good education in any sector. It has been an intractable problem for generations and the only convincing research I have read on it came from a study in the US that I read about a decade ago. I think it took place in Chicago and, broadly speaking, the suggestion was that when no more than 10% of the class are from the lowest socio-economic groups teachers can integrate them and teach well, so that the child out performs their projected level of attainment. Any more than that and the whole class tends to suffer a set back in their educational attainment. It is really important that this is done young, as the later it is implemented the less effect it has.