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The relationship of elite schools to economic capital is central to understanding the maintenance of their cultural power and institutional longevity. Since Glennerster and Wilson’s (1970) analysis, there has been little analysis of how private schools in England manage their wealth or how they are differentiated hierarchically by the composition and scale of the capital they hold. Research has explored the financing of elite universities (Spencer 2005; Piketty, 2014), with less attention on schools (James, Boden and Kenway Forthcoming). Using detailed Charities Commission financial data, I examine the finances of 216 English private schools in the Head Masters’ Conference association. The analysis entails a Principal Components Analysis followed by a Hierarchical Clustering on the Principal Components to reveal the economic hierarchy amongst elite schools in England. I then draw on the schools’ published accounts to examine this hierarchy further. These analyses show how the economic field of elite schools is dominated by just five schools with almost unassailable levels of wealth in property, investments and fees. Beneath them sit a wealthy group with smaller capital holdings and more diverse incomes including lucrative satellite campuses in Asia. These wealthier schools are largely boarding schools located in southern England. The provincial day schools of northern England and less prestigious boarding schools have much lower incomes and almost total reliance on tuition fees. Proximity to and control over capital allow schools to maintain their dominance, underlining how the material basis for elite cultural and class power in and over education is ultimately economic.

Since 2010 the language of social mobility has been increasingly utilised by UK politicians from across the political spectrum to denote a commitment to 'fair access' to opportunity in both education and the professions. Within this policy discourse the default understanding of inequality is premised on a narrow notion of access to elite education and employment positions, where a deeper understanding of the politics of social reproduction and inequality, or any meaningful emphasis on redistribution, is absent. The social mobility agenda is axiomatically an equality of opportunity agenda where the focus is on ‘levelling up’ those who are considered to be falling behind. Its focus on opportunity to the detriment of outcome thus rules out considerations of structural solutions to inequalities. In this paper, we unpack the discourses of social mobility that are prevalent in recent UK government papers and political talk, with a specific focus on the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) in order to consider how these shape policy approaches to education and labour market participation. We argue that the presiding 'race to the top' mentality undermines the very equality that the social mobility agenda claims to be seeking to achieve, and in doing so we implicate the SMC in purveying contradictory understandings of mobility that compound and conceal existing inequalities. Through a focus on graduate employment we problematise the role of Higher Education in the promotion of social mobility. We consider the role of employers participating in the Social Mobility Employers’ Index, and expose the contradictions between the performance of social mobility and the reality of corporate practices that entrench social inequalities. Our work underscores the need for a new political conversation about social mobility, and a redirection of attendant education and employment policy to focus on dismantling rather than reinforcing social hierarchies.

Our systems of further and higher education are no longer fit for purpose. After decades of marketisation and years of austerity cuts, recent high-profile strikes in the education sector signified a service at breaking point. But what to do? How do we pursue education, not as a commodity, but as ‘the practice of freedom’? How can we dismantle the elitism of higher education, the degradation of further education and create a system that promotes the values of justice, hope and solidarity? There are no easy answers but this collection of essays hopes to start a conversation about how we move forward.

Aspirations are frequently framed in Bourdieusian sociology with reference to contemporary dynamics of gender, class and race. Rather than focus simply on these identity markers to understand students’ aspirations, I instead use Bourdieu’s approach to history to explore how students’ aspirations are shaped by schools’ past struggles to gain dominance within the field of education. I draw on three approaches to history within Bourdieu’s work: the coming together of institution and individual, the structural history which shapes the rules of the field, and the processes associated with the accumulation of symbolic capital. I conceptualize students’ aspirations as formed by the coming together of institutional and personal history, exploring how this occurs in two elite state schools in London. These schools used students’ aspirations to accrue prestige and re-position themselves as dominant institutions within the field. To extend Bourdieu, I also draw on what Ball et al. (1995) call ‘circuits of education’, to theorize how institutional positions in the field are shaped by the movement of students toward elite universities through space and over time.

The degree of ethnic diversity in UK universities is extremely varied, reflecting the broader ethnic segregation across the country. Student protests around the representation of colonial figures in historic universities, about the ethnic attainment gap in higher education and about the racism students of colour experience at university underline the political importance and sensitivity of this issue. In this policy brief we provide a statistical analysis of the ethnic diversity of British universities. Using data on students going to university in 2014/15, we reflect for the first time on how the ethnic mix of where students grow up affects the university they attend. We find that students growing up in the least diverse neighbourhoods tend to attend the least diverse universities, but that these universities are still more diverse than where they grow up. This suggests universities are, superficially at least, places of mixing – but also that many students will not have grown up in ethnically diverse areas. Students who grow up in diverse neighbourhoods in large cities are disproportionately concentrated in the most diverse universities, which are largely ‘newer’ post-1992 universities in London and the Midlands. Many prestigious universities and specialised arts institutions do not reflect the diversity of the cities in which they are located. We also provide statistics on the ethnic diversity of subjects at different universities, showing how ethnic diversity and segregation within higher education are subtle and complex.