Why Your School Still Determines Your Future | Mini Episode

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Dr Faye Bate** (0:30)
I would like to come on to the section called Buy or Bye Bye.

**Sophie Pender** (0:32)
After we do. By the way, to be clear, I will buy anything. So I'm a consumer, I was born to buy.

**Dr Faye Bate** (0:38)
It's like metaphorical buy or bye bye, so they're not actually real products.
I'm going to add my own one that I haven't put down. It's a bit of a surprise wild card.

**Sophie Pender** (0:47)
Okay.

**Dr Faye Bate** (0:47)
Came off a conversation I had literally two days ago.

**Sophie Pender** (0:50)
Okay, nice.

**Dr Faye Bate** (0:50)
Oxbridge, buy or bye bye.

**Sophie Pender** (0:53)
I'm just laughing at the B in Oxbridge being big. I think that's the most state school thing ever. Oxbridge, buy or bye bye.
Do you know what? I'm going to say bye.

**Dr Faye Bate** (1:05)
Yeah.

**Sophie Pender** (1:05)
Reason being is that when people think about social mobility, they tend to swing one way or the other. They think about silver bullets and solutions. They're like, well, the key to solving social mobility is that we won't hire anyone from Oxbridge anymore. And my point is, there are working class kids at Oxbridge, they're in the 93% Club, go and hire those ones because they got there and they work their ass off.
Although, I will say, I got an interview at Oxford for English.
I think there was like 11 of us there for nine spaces and they asked me what books I'd read and I said, Harry Potter and then I never saw them again. And I got my feedback, which was four out of 10 So for my interview, obviously no one had ever interviewed for Oxbridge before. I had to sit an exam to get an interview. So by that point, they knew I was, so my predicted grades were like high. I had to sit an exam to actually get an interview. And then I had to submit my own written work to get an interview. So the interview was the final, final stage.

**Dr Faye Bate** (2:01)
That is-

**Sophie Pender** (2:01)
So I'm spied.

**Dr Faye Bate** (2:02)
Bye Oxbridge.

**Sophie Pender** (2:03)
No, I'm joking.

**Dr Faye Bate** (2:04)
That is classist in a way that is a little bit not overtly classist. Harry Potter is the most successful book for a lot of kids. You're not going to have an original copy of Withering Heights sat on your 4,000 year old library.

**Sophie Pender** (2:17)
There was a guy there who had a copy of Chaucer. Do you know what Chaucer is? Chaucer is this old English book.
It's based in a middle English, old English language that you don't read until you're in like second or third year of uni. And he had it under his arm. And I was at the interview because you actually meet the other candidates that you interview with. So you actually meet them. And you saw at that point, I know I was cooked.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:40)
I'm a private school final boss.

**Sophie Pender** (2:42)
So yeah, I'm pro Oxbridge in that, I feel like there are working class kids at Oxbridge and identify them, find them, hire them, as well as everyone else. Obviously Oxbridge is not the be all and end all. But yeah, I think that there's a lot to be desired in terms of the culture there. And there was this thing recently about one of the colleges introducing a policy to try and get more private schoolers in.

**Dr Faye Bate** (3:06)
I saw that.

**Sophie Pender** (3:07)
And I was just like, God, you guys are so lame.

**Dr Faye Bate** (3:10)
There was a comment that I left on one of your Instagram posts, which was one of my experiences at medical school was being private school passing. Well, clearly, they hadn't spot the intruder that I was in this circle. It was like nine people, eight of which were privately educated, and me being the nine.
And they were all talking about how much harder it was for them to get into medical school because they were privately educated, because of affirmative action and whatever. And I was sat there and I was like...