“So, where did you go to school?” On the face of it, it doesn’t seem like a loaded question. I was mostly bemused when I first started university 20 years ago and found myself being asked it repeatedly by other students. Why were they so interested? Surely no one would have heard of the north Wales comprehensive I had attended? When they countered my baffled reaction with “Charterhouse” or “Marlborough”, how was I supposed to respond? When one student said, of another, “He went to Winchester, you know”, I stared blankly at him, not understanding why he was telling me about someone else’s day trip to a city in Hampshire (“Oh, did he have a nice time?”). It was strange, new territory.
Asking someone where they went to school is often not an innocent question. It is a way of “placing” you on a social scale. As thousands of freshers settle in to their first terms at university, a significant proportion will be battling with this dawning awareness that Britain runs on a network of private schools whose alumni often seem to know, or know of, one another. State-school students might have been dimly aware of it before, but nothing puts it into sharper focus than freshers’ week. It’s clear that little has changed since my own student days. I was saddened to read recent reports of classism at St Andrews, which led to a student’s announcement that she would not return this academic year: “Working-class students have been made to feel ashamed of their home life at university,” she said. The pervasiveness of private school culture, as I suppose you could call it, remains nationwide and deeply embedded.
