To think being prejudiced against the privately educated is OK

[EastLondonObserver]

I have spent 25 years working in the advertising industry at some of the most highly regarded agencies in the world. Most of these have been dominated (in certain roles, at least) by the privately educated who gained their entry to the industry through having personal/family contacts in it, were subbed by rich parents while working in low-paid or free internships to gain experience and had that empty confidence private schools instil.

Perfectly capable graduates educated comprehensive schools didn't get much of a look in. However a few managed to break through, including myself.

Consequently, throughout my career I have actively rejected almost all privately educated graduates applying for entry level positions. This runs into hundreds of applicants. I have managed to do this without being called out. Sometimes I have rejected them even when they clearly would have done a better job than a comprehensive school educated alternative. These were corporate companies - it made no meaningful difference to me if they were mildly less successful as a consequence. The only exception was one graduate educated at Harrow and Bristol. I gave him the job as an experiment. He was average at best.

I did this in the name of social justice: re-distributing opportunities away from those with unearned privilege.

Have I been unreasonable? Has anyone else done the same?

Absolutely bang on @EastLondonObserver . The poster suggesting that positive discrimination 'punishes' people lays their agenda bare.

It's all a bit simplistic though isn't OP? Or do you dig down to see where the candidate went to primary school, what their parents' jobs were and where they lived whilst growing up? If they come from somewhere like Croydon it can be a total smokescreen as the presence of the Whitgift schools with very large full bursary funds and the state grammars can skew the picture significantly. SO you might get 2 CVs on your desk. The first is the son of 2 doctors living in a leafy suburb who got huge amounts of tutoring to pass the 11+ and went to the grammar school and on to Oxbridge. The second is the daughter of a single mum doing 2 low paid jobs and living on a sink estate who got a full bursary to a Whitgift school and on to Oxbridge. The life challenges the second child will have faced will be harder than the first but her CV goes in the bin because you stopped reading when you saw where she went to school. SO the child of the pushy parents wins again....

Do it openly then or even better, do it on your own dime.

Stop banging on about "other European societies", it just shows how little you know about them.

What a pointless post.

You would know @thedancingbear

Hmmn. Not sure. 40 years ago, some private school kids were sent to boarding school by their relatively wealthy abusive parents just because said parents couldn't be bothered parenting. Then when boarding school was no longer an option, those kids left a school at 18 with nothing. No local friends, no supportive parents - expected to leave home straightaway with no guidance and parents not even bothering to check out the room you'd managed to rent - and crucially, not a single adult to give decent careers advice (because those boarding schools expected the girls to marry rich, and the boys to be helped into a job by daddy). It was like being dropped off an isolated cliff.

YABU. There were children at expensive schools who should have been on the Children at Risk Register. If they had made it to an interview with you, then they would have done it entirely alone.

That makes no sense.

You are pushing for social change.

You have been doing this for years at companies and still doing it in secret. But, not making any permanent changes.

You have years of provable data, that binning off private school applicants is a good thing. But sat on it? Posting on Mn about instead of trying to get real change implemented. A real policy that a company is happy to be an official policy. Something that might have a positive impact on people for years?

I also find it strange that you're trying to socially re-engineer the workforce at your company by secretly binning any candidates whose schools you don't like... and then you're posting your 'secret' on mumsnet

Why don't you just hire in accordance with your company's policy? Who do you think you are making your own policy? Ironically, you sound as arrogant as your perception of the private school kids that you are hoping to avoid!

Yet you who supposedly understands them, have not yet posted anything substantive to convincingly argue otherwise. In the meantime, a couple of posters upthread have offered support to this strand of my argument .

Why do I think I am “making m own policy”? :). Because I have de facto for a quarter of a century across various companies :)

What's the obsession with parental decision making and 'punishing people'?? It has zero to do with that. For whatever reason (really doesn't matter) one bunch of people have experienced a lot of advantage, which helps set them up for life and means that in the majority of cases they benefit from biased positive outcomes.

Therefore, in a few minority of cases, a different group are positively biased towards, just slightly offsetting the skewed advantage the first group experiences. ....

No one is being punished. They are for once not the group who are being advantaged..... that's it....

To see this as anything but a tiny correction of the over-advantaging of one privileged group is wilful blindness.

The desperate attempts to make out private school kids as traumatised, unloved, abandoned, down-trodden heroines/ heroes is just laughable! Of course, in every population there are some who have suffered in some way, but come on! None of these traumas are not also experienced by state school kids, plus a bunch more!

Admit it, the huge majority of private school kids have some advantage in life which is not down to their intrinsic value or labour as human beings. To object to a bit of offsetting of that is simply to say that you like that and are invested in preserving it.

Sure, ideally people like OP wouldn't need to take guerilla action - we'd just live in a more just world. But until we do, stuff needs to be done as best and pragmatically as possible.

i posted because as I mentioned upthread I have m, at times, worried whether what I was doing was morally OK. But over the past 24 hours of reading responses I have been convinced I am doing the right thing and now hope others are inspired to
do the same.

The desperate attempts to make out private school kids as traumatised, unloved, abandoned, down-trodden heroines/ heroes is just laughable! Of course, in every population there are some who have suffered in some way, but come on! None of these traumas are not also experienced by state school kids, plus a bunch more!

Heh. All the posts saying 'well Hugo's parents sent him to boarding school and they hit him with sticks, and then his parents kicked him out, and no-one else at Morgan Stanley has to bear those scars. And Jasmine fell into a combine harvester so how can she be privileged' are as desperate as they are hilarious.

Everyone carries their own bundle of privileges and disadvantages, and no-one can walk a mile in another's shoes. But when it comes to the job market, those from private school backgrounds have a massive head start - particularly when many recruiters will select candidates on this basis alone.

@EastLondonObserver re moral dilemma...UK discrimination rules do allow for the legal possibility of doing something 'voluntarily' for people with 'protected characteristics' if they are 'under-represented in an activity or type of work'. Obviously a state school education is not a 'protected characteristic' but no denying the underrepresentedness.

i posted because as I mentioned upthread I have m, at times, worried whether what I was doing was morally OK. But over the past 24 hours of reading responses I have been convinced I am doing the right thing and now hope others are inspired to
do the same.

The vast majority of responses on here are not at all supportive of your actions.

Yes they are.

Bless

You are probably employing kids who went to state schools in nice areas. Kids who lived with parents who loved them. Kids who had nice homes and did fine at school. I really doubt you are employing truly deprived people.

I said who do you think you are making your own policy. Not why!

I was implying you have a bit of a god complex.

If you are so convinced you are right, why bother posting at all. What are you really getting out of this thread? You are wrong, incompetent and immoral. I say this a a state educated bame woman and have faced blatant discrimination my whole life. Shame on you.

Fantastic to see the frothing outrage of people who have paid to give their children an unfair advantage over other children but are railing against OP for fairly much doing exactly the same thing, but in reverse. Must be hard to look in that mirror sometimes.

The more we can all do to dismantle private education and the old school tie network the better.

Do you feel your dc are disadvantaged?

Well clearly private education gives children an advantage, on average, over children who aren’t privately educated. If it didn’t no-one would pay for it.