We Need to Talk About Class: Is It Time to Abolish Private Schools? (Sophie Pender)

**Amol Rajan** (0:00)
Before we start this week's episode, a little personal note from me.
This is actually my final episode of Radical. Well, my final conversation on Radical. We'll still have the Q&A episode on Monday, and next week, we're gonna have a best of Radical so far. Radical is going to continue. I'm gonna continue elsewhere. I'm not retiring. You'll still be able to find me in all the usual places. But this is my final conversation on Radical. It has been just the most enormous privilege to have all of these conversations with such smart and influential and thoughtful and powerful and just interesting guests. And also to get your thoughts, your questions, your insight each week. I'm so, honestly, I'm just so humbled at the amazing response that we've had from you to this podcast. Not just the sheer numbers listening, but the depth of your engagement. Thank you so much for all the time that you've given to Radical. And if I may say thank you to all of the brilliant people on the other side of the glass who I've worked with, to produce this show in such a fantastic way. There are gonna be more episodes of Radical coming soon, but I wanted to finish the last of my conversations with a really special guest. You're gonna hear about her in just a moment. And we're gonna talk about an issue which I think you know by now is a huge passion of mine. I think it lies behind so many others when we think about modern Britain. And that is this slightly slippery concept of social mobility. Who gets the chance to get on and why. That's gonna be our subject on this, my last normal episode of Radical.
Hello, it is Amol here. Welcome to Radical, these conversations about the deep local, national and global trends changing our world and offering you and our guests a safe space to submit some Radical ideas for the future. This week, we're ending my run of conversations on Radical with an absolute cracker. It's Sophie Pender, the founder and chief executive of The 93% Club.
The 93% Club takes its name from the overwhelming majority of people in Britain who went to state school. In spite of that majority, Sophie argues that most of our powerful institutions still feel calibrated to a much smaller, privately educated world and that the benefits of private schools for those who went to them go far beyond who gets the best teaching. As the old saying goes, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And Sophie decided, while she was at Bristol University, that if you can't beat them, you join them. What began as a student society, really a little network on Facebook for her mates, is now a huge and growing nationwide network of state-educated students and professionals offering support, mentoring and connections. She's trying to flip the script, she's trying to rewrite it, using networking to help that 93% of the country increase their representation in the UK's top professions. She's taken pretty radical steps to try and accelerate social mobility, but she thinks we've often defined social mobility too narrowly, as an exceptional individual escaping their background and making it into elite systems and networks and professions. She wants us to be much more ambitious, and ambition is a big theme of what we're about to discuss, and she wants us to question why anyone should have to move to leave their community and tone down their identity and their accent and their personality to be successful. She says, why not change the system, the institutions instead? So, Sophie wants to challenge the two-tier education system that separates children so early to build a country where talent doesn't need the right postcode or connections to thrive. That raises some very uncomfortable questions. Can a country with private schools ever be truly meritocratic? Should social mobility mean joining the establishment or changing it? And can Britain create a fairer system without asking people to give up the advantages that they have inherited? Before we begin, just a quick reminder, on Monday, Sophie's answering your Radical questions, the bonus episodes which you have driven so brilliantly. Thank you for all of the questions that you have submitted to us. We appreciate it so much as do our guests. And just to say, if you subscribe to Radical on BBC Sounds, you will get a notification each time it drops. Now, on to this week's episode of Radical with Sophie Pender.
Okay, let's do it. Sophie Pender, what's going on? How are you?

**Sophie Pender** (4:29)
I'm all right.

**Amol Rajan** (4:30)
So I'm feeling nervous.

**Sophie Pender** (4:32)
I'm feeling nervous.

**Amol Rajan** (4:33)