Going to private school makes you twice as likely to vote Tory, study finds

Having a private school education means a person is twice as likely to become a loyal Conservative voter as someone with a state education, regardless of their wealth or class background, a new study has found.

Researchers from University College London used data that tracked the lives of 6,917 British people born in the same week in 1970 to quantify how a private education affected their voting and attitudes. The team, led by Prof Richard Wiggins, established that being educated privately also made men and women 50% more likely to hold rightwing opinions.

In an article in the British Sociological Association journal Sociology, the researchers say: “Our key conclusion is that, among males and females, there is a notable direct association between private schooling in the mid-1980s and later voting Conservative, and the expression of rightwing attitudes in midlife, which cannot be explained by family background and related factors.” They said the findings were significant because “a disproportionate number of private school alumni have reached positions of substantive influence in public and commercial life”.

Although only 7% of the general population are privately educated, 41% of Conservative MPs, 44% of newspaper columnists and a third of the British chairs of FTSE 100 companies went to independent schools, according to the Sutton Trust, a charity which aims to improve social mobility. Last year, it highlighted that 19 out of the 31 members of Rishi Sunak’s cabinet were privately schooled, a similar ratio to the cabinets of Liz Truss and Boris Johnson.

Although there is a clear association between private education and voting Conservative, the UCL researchers set out to establish whether this might simply be a reflection of what Wiggins called a “constellation” of possible influences, such as person’s class background, family income or their parents’ taste in newspapers.

“No one is claiming that it’s an explicit object of teaching in private schools to inculcate students with conservative political attitudes,” Wiggins said. “Is it something to do with your peers, the kind of people you meet when you’re there? Or are there implicit assumptions in the way teachers talk about society?”

The team found that 64% of privately educated people in the study voted Conservative at least once, and 30% voted for them at three or four elections. That compares with 39.9% of state-school educated people voting Conservative at least once, and 15.5% voted three or four times.

By using a statistical method called path analysis, they found several factors influencing people’s decision to vote Conservative. Some factors had only an indirect path to voting behaviour, according to the model. Having parents who read a right-leaning newspaper was a pathway to the expression of rightwing attitudes at the age of 16, which in turn had a direct path to voting Conservative.

Other factors, including a private education, had a direct path to Conservative voting. Having a university degree made people in the British Cohort Study less likely to vote Tory but did not make them any more or less likely to hold rightwing views.

Private education had more effect on men’s tendency to vote Conservative, they found, yet women were more likely to hold rightwing views after going to private school than men.

Wiggins said that despite their findings there were still very large differences in patterns of voting behaviour in the groups.

“I was quite surprised to see there were not that many diehard Conservative voters even in people in their 40s,” he said. “We’re only seeing a fifth of these private school attendees voting solidly Conservative over the four elections. It’s not a landslide.”