Is the British education system designed to polarise people?

 ‘We have an educational system that is designed to polarise people, one that creates an elite,’ says Danny Dorling.

I grew up in Oxford, but left my hometown to study and then worked at universities in Newcastle, Bristol, Leeds and Sheffield. People who read my words but didn’t hear my accent often assumed I was from the north. But now I’ve come full circle, and have taken up a chair in geography at Oxford University.

It is geography that reveals just how divided we have become as a society in this country. There are places from which it appears almost impossible to succeed educationally and others where it seems very hard to fail. On any given day, a fifth of children in Britain qualify for free school meals. Just one in 100 of those children get to go to either Oxford or Cambridge University. Four private schools and one highly selective state sixth-form college send more children to Oxbridge than do 2,000 other secondary schools. The most prestigious 100 schools secure 30% of all Oxbridge places. And 84 of them are private schools.

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