What level playing field?

By accidents of birth most children have reduced chances of fulfilling their natural potential and Scotland. Private schools have for centuries been used as the breeding ground for the ruling. It creates a divide between us, the plebs, and they, the masters.

The Sutton Report states the poor from Scotland are 4 times less likely to go to University than those from wealthy backgrounds. In England this figure is only 2.4 times.

MSPs are now five times more likely than the average Scot to be educated at a fee-paying school. Around four per cent of Scots have had the purchased privileges of an education at one of these facilities, yet fully 20 per cent of our elected representatives attended one.

A head teacher of a Glasgow secondary school which serves some of this city’s most disadvantaged neighbourhoods pointed to the “invisible discriminators” which diminished the chances of his brightest pupils fulfilling their potential. These ranged from being denied internships at big city private practices to large fees for CAT exams to universities routinely deploying artificially high entry qualification levels as a means of filtering out pupils from deprived backgrounds.