Private schools fuel division in society, politics and pay, says study

Annual survey of attitudes reveals perceived social apartheid with powerful 'elite' dislocating government from populace
Do private schools offer enough public benefit to be considered charities?
Private schools perpetuate a sense of social apartheid, suggests the latest NCSR survey. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian Murdo MacLeod/Guardian

Private education perpetuates a form of "social apartheid" and has given rise to a political class drawn from a "segregated elite" that does not understand or share the views of most people, the annual British social attitudes survey warns on Wednesday.

The study, by the National Centre for Social Research (NCSR), which surveys a representative sample of more than 3,300 people annually, also found that televised debates during the elections failed to enthuse voters, that the NHS is recording its highest-ever satisfaction ratings, and, just before the riots erupted, six out of 10 respondents said most young people were "responsible and well-behaved".

But the survey's most controversial analysis centres on why class matters more than ever in British life by looking at the educational background of respondents for the first time.

From this, researchers could identify a "sense of superiority bonus" that comes from attending a private school.

This "superiority" manifests itself in a belief that private education confers a higher position on the ladder of life.

After accounting for family background, the study found that the privately educated are still roughly twice as likely as state school pupils to see themselves as being middle or upper-middle class.

The privately schooled also have an in-built bias to value the work of "top people" more highly than others, because captains of industry and cabinet ministers were "people like us". This tendency is especially pronounced when considering how much people should be paid.

When asked how much a company chairman should earn on average, privately educated people suggested an average figure of £237,000 a year, £88,000 higher than the average level proposed by those who went to state schools.

State-educated respondents were also more concerned with social inequality. Private schools, the NCSR said, "produced Conservative partisans".

Strikingly, on issues of crime and punishment, the privately educated were more liberal: 61% of state-educated people agreed that the death penalty should be brought back. Only 47% of those who attended fee-paying schools agreed.

In the absence of any agreed way to identify people as upper class, the report concludes that one indicator has persisted: where they went to school. They represent a self-replicating caste, being likely to marry each other and send their children to private schools.

The report also highlights the social divide at the heart of government. The prime minister is an Etonian son of a stockbroker who married a baronet's daughter,; his deputy attended Westminster school, and the chancellor went to St Paul's school. Across government, two-thirds of ministers were privately educated. The NCSR says studies in the past decade have found that more than half of senior civil servants went to private schools and the vast majority of senior judges are privately educated.

The report says: "The dominance in the current government of people who come from such a segregated elite can only add to concerns that it does not understand or share the views of the vast majority of the population it purports to represent."

The report also highlights a surging disillusionment with politics. Only 20% trust the government to put the interests of the nation above those of their own political party "most of the time" – down from 33% in 1997 and 47% in 1987.

Although half of respondents watched the televised leaders' debates in the 2010 election, making them one of the most popular ways of following the campaign, three-quarters of the audience were those who confessed to being interested in politics anyway.

On the NHS, the study found that the health service in 2010 was the most popular it has ever been, with satisfaction ratings of 70%, up 5% in a year.

The report says that expectations have also become more favourable about the likelihood of being seen promptly by a doctor, with 73% "definitely" or "probably" saying they would get an appointment at a hospital outpatient department within three months.

"The government will have to watch how its NHS reforms affect that because there has been a marked improvement in recent years," said Alison Park, who edited the report.

The report also looked at childhood. While most of those questioned thought Britain is a good country to grow up in, only a minority think children are happier now than they were a decade ago.

Despite the changes outlined last month in the chancellor's spending review, which would increase child poverty by 100,000 by 2013, an overwhelming majority of the public support action to reduce child poverty, with most people seeing this as a task for central and local government.

The NCSR concludes that "although people do see child poverty as something for ministers to tackle, it is seen as rooted in poor parenting. Less engaged or willing to make sacrifices for the common good during challenging times, the British public perhaps increasingly sees it as the responsibility of the individual to get through. If that's true, what hope for the big society?"