It is a school that has educated Prime Ministers, Princes, Archbishops and Kings, a school that is as exclusive as is expensive.
In part two of our mini-series on British social class, we'll take a look inside the most exclusive private school in Britain, Eton College.
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our three part series where we will explore British high society.
[00:00:28] As a reminder, in part one we talked about the titles of the British aristocracy: Duke, Earl, Viscount and so on.
[00:00:38] In part three we are going to look at the real lives of the people who waited on British aristocrats, their servants.
[00:00:45] And today we are going to look at where they went to school. Eton College, the most famous school in Britain.
[00:00:54] OK then, let’s get right into it.
[00:00:57] If you have to think back to your school years, perhaps someone from your school went on to some important job or position in society.
[00:01:07] Perhaps someone from your school wrote a well-known book, had a hit single, or went into business and made a lot of money.
[00:01:16] Perhaps you went to school with an actor, a football player, someone who is now a famous YouTuber.
[00:01:23] Maybe someone from your school went into politics, perhaps they even became Prime Minister or President of your country.
[00:01:32] For most people it is unlikely, but for a student at Eton College, it is almost a given, it is a certainty.
[00:01:43] This one school has produced 20 Prime Ministers, countless politicians, playwrights, actors, journalists, economists, historians, princes and kings.
[00:01:57] You will no doubt have heard of many of them.
[00:02:00] Princes William and Harry. George Orwell, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm, Guy Burgess, who you might remember from our mini-series on The Cambridge Five.
[00:02:12] The explorers Ranulph Fiennes and Bear Grylls.
[00:02:16] Actors such as Damian Lewis, who you might know from Homeland or Band of Brothers.
[00:02:22] Eddie Redmayne, who you might remember as Stephen Hawking from The Theory of Everything.
[00:02:28] Or Dominic West, who you might know as McNulty from The Wire.
[00:02:34] This one school has produced more public figures than any other in the UK, and in today’s episode we are going to lift the curtain on why.
[00:02:46] To start off, I want to tell you about a confusion in the English language, and a confusion that is specific to the UK.
[00:02:57] In the UK, there are state schools, government schools. Every child in the UK has the right to a free education provided by the government, they have the right to go to one of these schools.
[00:03:10] And there are also private schools, schools which are not free, and in many cases cost tens of thousands of Euros a year to attend. Some of these are “boarding schools”, where students don’t just study at the school; they sleep and spend weekends at the school as well.
[00:03:32] The confusing thing is that the most expensive and most prestigious private schools are called public schools.
[00:03:42] And right at the top of the list of the most prestigious public schools in the UK is Eton College, which teaches around 1,350 students aged between 13 and 18.
[00:03:57] Now, we are going to divide this episode into three parts.
[00:04:02] First we’ll talk about the history of Eton, as it has a lot of history, and it is rather interesting.
[00:04:09] Then we’ll talk about what life at Eton is actually like, as I’d be pretty confident that it is very different from the experience you had at school.
[00:04:19] And finally we’ll talk about how Eton has adapted and evolved over the years, and what the future might look like.
[00:04:28] Right, first off, some history.
[00:04:31] The school was founded in the year 1440 by King Henry VI.
[00:04:37] The king chose a small grassy area on the River Thames for his new school, which was to be just north of Windsor Castle, and is around 20 kilometres to the west of London.
[00:04:50] And the school is still there today, with many of the original buildings still standing.
[00:04:56] In fact, if you ever fly into London Heathrow Airport from the west, you will fly right over Eton College; it’s only a few kilometres away from the country’s busiest airport.
[00:05:10] Now, it might be the most exclusive school in the country, but when it was first founded the King ensured that it had space for 70 so-called “poor boys” who could live at and attend the school free of charge, without paying anything.
[00:05:29] Other boys could go to the school for free, but they would have to pay for their accommodation.
[00:05:36] This was the case when it was founded, in 1440, and interestingly enough, it is still broadly the case today.
[00:05:45] Approximately 20% of the students are given some form of financial assistance, and around 8% don’t pay anything at all. We’ll talk more about this later on.
[00:05:59] To this day boys sleep and study at the school, living in “boarding houses”.
[00:06:06] And, in case you thought it was a slip of the tongue, I did mean “boys”, not “boys and girls”. Eton is one of the few remaining public schools in the UK that doesn’t allow girls.
[00:06:19] Some things, fortunately, have changed.
[00:06:22] When the school first opened the language of instruction was not English, not French, not Old English but….Latin.
[00:06:32] And for the boys who went there, it was a pretty harsh existence.
[00:06:39] According to the Eton website, “The school day began at 5am with prayers, before lessons began at 6am. Lessons finally finished at 8pm, and there was a single hour of play allowed each day. There were two holidays in the year, at Christmas and in the summer, although the boys did not go home at Christmas.”
[00:07:03] Imagine that, you would arrive at the school in September, you would not leave until the following July. You would spend 7 days a week there, for 10 months of the year, and you would rise at 5 o’ clock in the morning and not finish studying until 8 o’ clock in the evening.
[00:07:23] It must have been pretty intense.
[00:07:25] Soon enough, this school became the “go-to” school for the British aristocracy.
[00:07:32] Boys were educated there, in this tiny bubble of society where they spent five years with boys who came from similar backgrounds.
[00:07:42] Firstly, this was because it was expensive. We’ll talk about exactly how much it costs in a minute, but the price to go there was out of reach for all but the richest in society.
[00:07:55] Secondly it was because you had to be accepted, and for many years, your probability of being accepted was determined not by you and your abilities but by who your parents were.
[00:08:09] And in most cases, who your father was.
[00:08:13] It helped if your father had gone to Eton himself, and as recently as 1960, 60% of the boys at Eton had fathers who had also gone to the school.
[00:08:26] I should say that this number is now down to 20%, but it still gives you some idea of how traditional the place is, and how it educated generation after generation of the same family.
[00:08:41] Another particularly traditional part of life at Eton is the uniform, the clothes that boys are required to wear.
[00:08:50] Now, wearing a uniform at a school in Britain is not unusual; in fact, most schools do require it, both state and private.
[00:09:00] But the uniform for Eton is something else, it takes formality to an entirely new level.
[00:09:09] Until 1948 boys were required to wear a top hat. And this requirement was only removed because of rationing in the post-war period, not because of any great modernisation.
[00:09:26] Today, boys still need to wear a black three-piece suit with long tails, and they wear a starched stiff collar with a white “tie”.
[00:09:38] If you close your eyes and imagine dressing up a 15 year old boy as an 18th century English aristocrat, you have probably imagined something very similar to the official uniform of Eton College.
[00:09:52] Now, one thing that we haven’t talked about yet is the actual quality of the tuition at Eton, about the schooling itself.
[00:10:02] It is widely known as one of the best schools in the country.
[00:10:07] The exam results that students get are very good, a high proportion go to the best universities in the country, and, as you can see from the lengthy list of famous ex Etonians, famous old boys of the school, lots go on to success in everything from business to politics to acting.
[00:10:27] As to the question of “why”, or how can one school achieve such brilliant results, there are differing theories.
[00:10:37] One is that these are boys who typically come from very privileged backgrounds anyway, so they have the family connections and wealth to give them a head start, in a way that most children do not.
[00:10:51] Another is that going to a school with children that often come from rich and successful families is bound to give a child the sense that they can achieve anything, even if they didn’t come from this kind of background themselves.
[00:11:06] To quote an article that was written in Eton’s student magazine by a 16-year-old pupil at the school, “Strain every nerve, parents of Britain, to send your son to this educational establishment… Exercise your freedom of choice because in this way you will imbue your son with the most important thing, a sense of his own importance.”
[00:11:31] That 16-year-old pupil, by the way, the author of the article was Boris Johson, who would go on to be a British Prime Minister.
[00:11:40] Now, what is undeniable even to the school’s biggest critics is that the quality of tuition at Eton, the quality of teachers, is incredibly high.
[00:11:51] The student to teacher ratio is 8 to 1, meaning that there is one teacher for every 8 students.
[00:12:00] In standard British schools this ratio is 16.4 to one, which means that Eton has more than double the number of teachers per student.
[00:12:12] And the teachers at the school are very high quality: it is one of the most desirable schools in the country, and the pay is very high, with more than 40 teachers being paid over £100,000, so that’s around €120,000.
[00:12:29] For reference, the average salary for a teacher in the UK is £42,000, so just under €50,000.
[00:12:38] Now, as to the question of how Eton is able to pay its teachers so much, well here’s where I tell you how much it costs for a boy to go to Eton.
[00:12:50] There are three terms per year, and each term currently costs £16,666, so that’s £50,000 a year, just for the tuition. And with five years in total plus the cost of the uniform, trips, additional classes and so on, it will end up being closer to £300,000, so that’s around €350,000.
[00:13:20] It is, to state the obvious, a lot of money, so much that you have to be right in the top earning bracket to be able to afford a place.
[00:13:30] But winning a place at Eton is now about much more than how many zeroes you, or rather, your parents, have on your bank balance.
[00:13:41] There is a very tough application process.
[00:13:44] Every boy needs to apply, then have an interview at the age of 11. If they impress the interviewer, they will be offered a place, contingent on getting excellent grades at an exam they take at the age of 13.
[00:14:00] No longer can you simply say who your father is, cough up the money and expect to be welcomed with open arms; you need to be academically capable to be offered a place;
[00:14:11] Indeed, in many cases, you don’t need to pay anything at all to win a place.
[00:14:17] Eton’s stated aim is to encourage applications from candidates with as diverse a range of backgrounds as possible who meet the academic standard required for entry.
[00:14:28] Your ability to pay the fees should not, in theory, be an obstacle, and as you heard, 20% of boys at the school don’t pay full fees, with one in every 13 boys paying nothing at all.
[00:14:43] And this is one of the contradictions of Eton, or at least a contradiction in the public eye.
[00:14:51] On the one hand it is seen as an exclusive club where only the richest may apply, a school which perpetuates social injustice by giving an unfair advantage to boys who are already privileged enough.
[00:15:05] British tabloids use Eton as the quintessential example of upper class privilege, a school that perpetuates social inequality by offering a superior education to the one available to 99.99% of the population.
[00:15:22] But on the other hand, Eton is now much more meritocratic than it is given credit for. It gives the opportunity for a first-class quality of education to boys who would otherwise not have received it.
[00:15:36] The school will happily offer a completely free place, worth many hundreds of thousands of Euros, to a clever and ambitious young boy who would otherwise almost certainly have received an inferior education.
[00:15:50] Sure, it only does this for a very small number of boys in the grand scheme of things, but on a micro level, for the boys that win these free places, this will in all likelihood be a life changing experience in terms of social mobility and life opportunities.
[00:16:08] And, interestingly enough, the type of boy who goes to Eton and pays the full fees has also changed significantly over the past twenty to thirty years.
[00:16:20] Even 30 years ago, it was expensive but significantly more affordable than it is today, it was around £12,000 a year in 1995 versus £50,000 a year today. Yes, expensive, but still affordable to many “old money” families.
[00:16:41] So, it was full of the sons of old Etonians, old boys of the school, who you were, who your father was, this was the deciding factor.
[00:16:53] The fact that it is now so expensive has really priced this type of parent out, the parent that might have historically had lots of money, land, and so on, but not the almost million Euros in cash that it does today to educate two boys at the school.
[00:17:11] And this has changed the type of boy that you will find at the school.
[00:17:15] Gone, or at least substantially reduced, are these “old money” types, and there has been an increase of boys from families that are able to pay the fees but might not have come from a traditional Eton background themselves: immigrant families, wealthy Asian or Middle Eastern parents, and so on.
[00:17:35] This is a big change for the school; if you were to look at an Eton school photo from any time before the 1960s, you would have been presented with a wall of white faces.
[00:17:49] In fact, the first black boy to complete his studies at Eton ended up writing a book about the terrible racist treatment he received, and this was in 1969.
[00:18:02] Nowadays, 20% of the students are Black or Asian, which is, in fact, a higher percentage than the UK average.
[00:18:12] So, to wrap things up, yes Eton College is still where the British elite is educated.
[00:18:20] There is, statistically speaking, most probably a future British Prime Minister studying there right now, putting on his stiff collar, adjusting his coat tails, and perhaps even reciting Latin verses in his room at night.
[00:18:37] But this “elite” Etonian from 2023 is a very different type of elite compared to his predecessor from 1923, or even from 2003.
[00:18:50] His father probably didn’t go to Eton, perhaps his father isn’t even British, he won his place on merit alone, and perhaps he isn’t paying a penny for the privilege of going to the most famous school in Britain.
[00:19:08] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Eton College.
[00:19:12] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:17] I should say that you can actually visit the school, you can go on a tour of the college during the summer months, so if you are in London between May and September and you would like to peek inside the most famous school in the country, then you can do that.
[00:19:33] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:37] Had you heard about Eton College before?
[00:19:39] Are there private schools in your country? And what do you think about them?
[00:19:44] Can they sometimes be a vehicle for social change, or are they something that perpetuates social inequality and should be abolished?
[00:19:52] I know we have loads of current and ex teachers, so I would particularly like to know what you think.
[00:19:59] As always, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:08] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:13] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our three part series where we will explore British high society.
[00:00:28] As a reminder, in part one we talked about the titles of the British aristocracy: Duke, Earl, Viscount and so on.
[00:00:38] In part three we are going to look at the real lives of the people who waited on British aristocrats, their servants.
[00:00:45] And today we are going to look at where they went to school. Eton College, the most famous school in Britain.
[00:00:54] OK then, let’s get right into it.
[00:00:57] If you have to think back to your school years, perhaps someone from your school went on to some important job or position in society.
[00:01:07] Perhaps someone from your school wrote a well-known book, had a hit single, or went into business and made a lot of money.
[00:01:16] Perhaps you went to school with an actor, a football player, someone who is now a famous YouTuber.
[00:01:23] Maybe someone from your school went into politics, perhaps they even became Prime Minister or President of your country.
[00:01:32] For most people it is unlikely, but for a student at Eton College, it is almost a given, it is a certainty.
[00:01:43] This one school has produced 20 Prime Ministers, countless politicians, playwrights, actors, journalists, economists, historians, princes and kings.
[00:01:57] You will no doubt have heard of many of them.
[00:02:00] Princes William and Harry. George Orwell, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm, Guy Burgess, who you might remember from our mini-series on The Cambridge Five.
[00:02:12] The explorers Ranulph Fiennes and Bear Grylls.
[00:02:16] Actors such as Damian Lewis, who you might know from Homeland or Band of Brothers.
[00:02:22] Eddie Redmayne, who you might remember as Stephen Hawking from The Theory of Everything.
[00:02:28] Or Dominic West, who you might know as McNulty from The Wire.
[00:02:34] This one school has produced more public figures than any other in the UK, and in today’s episode we are going to lift the curtain on why.
[00:02:46] To start off, I want to tell you about a confusion in the English language, and a confusion that is specific to the UK.
[00:02:57] In the UK, there are state schools, government schools. Every child in the UK has the right to a free education provided by the government, they have the right to go to one of these schools.
[00:03:10] And there are also private schools, schools which are not free, and in many cases cost tens of thousands of Euros a year to attend. Some of these are “boarding schools”, where students don’t just study at the school; they sleep and spend weekends at the school as well.
[00:03:32] The confusing thing is that the most expensive and most prestigious private schools are called public schools.
[00:03:42] And right at the top of the list of the most prestigious public schools in the UK is Eton College, which teaches around 1,350 students aged between 13 and 18.
[00:03:57] Now, we are going to divide this episode into three parts.
[00:04:02] First we’ll talk about the history of Eton, as it has a lot of history, and it is rather interesting.
[00:04:09] Then we’ll talk about what life at Eton is actually like, as I’d be pretty confident that it is very different from the experience you had at school.
[00:04:19] And finally we’ll talk about how Eton has adapted and evolved over the years, and what the future might look like.
[00:04:28] Right, first off, some history.
[00:04:31] The school was founded in the year 1440 by King Henry VI.
[00:04:37] The king chose a small grassy area on the River Thames for his new school, which was to be just north of Windsor Castle, and is around 20 kilometres to the west of London.
[00:04:50] And the school is still there today, with many of the original buildings still standing.
[00:04:56] In fact, if you ever fly into London Heathrow Airport from the west, you will fly right over Eton College; it’s only a few kilometres away from the country’s busiest airport.
[00:05:10] Now, it might be the most exclusive school in the country, but when it was first founded the King ensured that it had space for 70 so-called “poor boys” who could live at and attend the school free of charge, without paying anything.
[00:05:29] Other boys could go to the school for free, but they would have to pay for their accommodation.
[00:05:36] This was the case when it was founded, in 1440, and interestingly enough, it is still broadly the case today.
[00:05:45] Approximately 20% of the students are given some form of financial assistance, and around 8% don’t pay anything at all. We’ll talk more about this later on.
[00:05:59] To this day boys sleep and study at the school, living in “boarding houses”.
[00:06:06] And, in case you thought it was a slip of the tongue, I did mean “boys”, not “boys and girls”. Eton is one of the few remaining public schools in the UK that doesn’t allow girls.
[00:06:19] Some things, fortunately, have changed.
[00:06:22] When the school first opened the language of instruction was not English, not French, not Old English but….Latin.
[00:06:32] And for the boys who went there, it was a pretty harsh existence.
[00:06:39] According to the Eton website, “The school day began at 5am with prayers, before lessons began at 6am. Lessons finally finished at 8pm, and there was a single hour of play allowed each day. There were two holidays in the year, at Christmas and in the summer, although the boys did not go home at Christmas.”
[00:07:03] Imagine that, you would arrive at the school in September, you would not leave until the following July. You would spend 7 days a week there, for 10 months of the year, and you would rise at 5 o’ clock in the morning and not finish studying until 8 o’ clock in the evening.
[00:07:23] It must have been pretty intense.
[00:07:25] Soon enough, this school became the “go-to” school for the British aristocracy.
[00:07:32] Boys were educated there, in this tiny bubble of society where they spent five years with boys who came from similar backgrounds.
[00:07:42] Firstly, this was because it was expensive. We’ll talk about exactly how much it costs in a minute, but the price to go there was out of reach for all but the richest in society.
[00:07:55] Secondly it was because you had to be accepted, and for many years, your probability of being accepted was determined not by you and your abilities but by who your parents were.
[00:08:09] And in most cases, who your father was.
[00:08:13] It helped if your father had gone to Eton himself, and as recently as 1960, 60% of the boys at Eton had fathers who had also gone to the school.
[00:08:26] I should say that this number is now down to 20%, but it still gives you some idea of how traditional the place is, and how it educated generation after generation of the same family.
[00:08:41] Another particularly traditional part of life at Eton is the uniform, the clothes that boys are required to wear.
[00:08:50] Now, wearing a uniform at a school in Britain is not unusual; in fact, most schools do require it, both state and private.
[00:09:00] But the uniform for Eton is something else, it takes formality to an entirely new level.
[00:09:09] Until 1948 boys were required to wear a top hat. And this requirement was only removed because of rationing in the post-war period, not because of any great modernisation.
[00:09:26] Today, boys still need to wear a black three-piece suit with long tails, and they wear a starched stiff collar with a white “tie”.
[00:09:38] If you close your eyes and imagine dressing up a 15 year old boy as an 18th century English aristocrat, you have probably imagined something very similar to the official uniform of Eton College.
[00:09:52] Now, one thing that we haven’t talked about yet is the actual quality of the tuition at Eton, about the schooling itself.
[00:10:02] It is widely known as one of the best schools in the country.
[00:10:07] The exam results that students get are very good, a high proportion go to the best universities in the country, and, as you can see from the lengthy list of famous ex Etonians, famous old boys of the school, lots go on to success in everything from business to politics to acting.
[00:10:27] As to the question of “why”, or how can one school achieve such brilliant results, there are differing theories.
[00:10:37] One is that these are boys who typically come from very privileged backgrounds anyway, so they have the family connections and wealth to give them a head start, in a way that most children do not.
[00:10:51] Another is that going to a school with children that often come from rich and successful families is bound to give a child the sense that they can achieve anything, even if they didn’t come from this kind of background themselves.
[00:11:06] To quote an article that was written in Eton’s student magazine by a 16-year-old pupil at the school, “Strain every nerve, parents of Britain, to send your son to this educational establishment… Exercise your freedom of choice because in this way you will imbue your son with the most important thing, a sense of his own importance.”
[00:11:31] That 16-year-old pupil, by the way, the author of the article was Boris Johson, who would go on to be a British Prime Minister.
[00:11:40] Now, what is undeniable even to the school’s biggest critics is that the quality of tuition at Eton, the quality of teachers, is incredibly high.
[00:11:51] The student to teacher ratio is 8 to 1, meaning that there is one teacher for every 8 students.
[00:12:00] In standard British schools this ratio is 16.4 to one, which means that Eton has more than double the number of teachers per student.
[00:12:12] And the teachers at the school are very high quality: it is one of the most desirable schools in the country, and the pay is very high, with more than 40 teachers being paid over £100,000, so that’s around €120,000.
[00:12:29] For reference, the average salary for a teacher in the UK is £42,000, so just under €50,000.
[00:12:38] Now, as to the question of how Eton is able to pay its teachers so much, well here’s where I tell you how much it costs for a boy to go to Eton.
[00:12:50] There are three terms per year, and each term currently costs £16,666, so that’s £50,000 a year, just for the tuition. And with five years in total plus the cost of the uniform, trips, additional classes and so on, it will end up being closer to £300,000, so that’s around €350,000.
[00:13:20] It is, to state the obvious, a lot of money, so much that you have to be right in the top earning bracket to be able to afford a place.
[00:13:30] But winning a place at Eton is now about much more than how many zeroes you, or rather, your parents, have on your bank balance.
[00:13:41] There is a very tough application process.
[00:13:44] Every boy needs to apply, then have an interview at the age of 11. If they impress the interviewer, they will be offered a place, contingent on getting excellent grades at an exam they take at the age of 13.
[00:14:00] No longer can you simply say who your father is, cough up the money and expect to be welcomed with open arms; you need to be academically capable to be offered a place;
[00:14:11] Indeed, in many cases, you don’t need to pay anything at all to win a place.
[00:14:17] Eton’s stated aim is to encourage applications from candidates with as diverse a range of backgrounds as possible who meet the academic standard required for entry.
[00:14:28] Your ability to pay the fees should not, in theory, be an obstacle, and as you heard, 20% of boys at the school don’t pay full fees, with one in every 13 boys paying nothing at all.
[00:14:43] And this is one of the contradictions of Eton, or at least a contradiction in the public eye.
[00:14:51] On the one hand it is seen as an exclusive club where only the richest may apply, a school which perpetuates social injustice by giving an unfair advantage to boys who are already privileged enough.
[00:15:05] British tabloids use Eton as the quintessential example of upper class privilege, a school that perpetuates social inequality by offering a superior education to the one available to 99.99% of the population.
[00:15:22] But on the other hand, Eton is now much more meritocratic than it is given credit for. It gives the opportunity for a first-class quality of education to boys who would otherwise not have received it.
[00:15:36] The school will happily offer a completely free place, worth many hundreds of thousands of Euros, to a clever and ambitious young boy who would otherwise almost certainly have received an inferior education.
[00:15:50] Sure, it only does this for a very small number of boys in the grand scheme of things, but on a micro level, for the boys that win these free places, this will in all likelihood be a life changing experience in terms of social mobility and life opportunities.
[00:16:08] And, interestingly enough, the type of boy who goes to Eton and pays the full fees has also changed significantly over the past twenty to thirty years.
[00:16:20] Even 30 years ago, it was expensive but significantly more affordable than it is today, it was around £12,000 a year in 1995 versus £50,000 a year today. Yes, expensive, but still affordable to many “old money” families.
[00:16:41] So, it was full of the sons of old Etonians, old boys of the school, who you were, who your father was, this was the deciding factor.
[00:16:53] The fact that it is now so expensive has really priced this type of parent out, the parent that might have historically had lots of money, land, and so on, but not the almost million Euros in cash that it does today to educate two boys at the school.
[00:17:11] And this has changed the type of boy that you will find at the school.
[00:17:15] Gone, or at least substantially reduced, are these “old money” types, and there has been an increase of boys from families that are able to pay the fees but might not have come from a traditional Eton background themselves: immigrant families, wealthy Asian or Middle Eastern parents, and so on.
[00:17:35] This is a big change for the school; if you were to look at an Eton school photo from any time before the 1960s, you would have been presented with a wall of white faces.
[00:17:49] In fact, the first black boy to complete his studies at Eton ended up writing a book about the terrible racist treatment he received, and this was in 1969.
[00:18:02] Nowadays, 20% of the students are Black or Asian, which is, in fact, a higher percentage than the UK average.
[00:18:12] So, to wrap things up, yes Eton College is still where the British elite is educated.
[00:18:20] There is, statistically speaking, most probably a future British Prime Minister studying there right now, putting on his stiff collar, adjusting his coat tails, and perhaps even reciting Latin verses in his room at night.
[00:18:37] But this “elite” Etonian from 2023 is a very different type of elite compared to his predecessor from 1923, or even from 2003.
[00:18:50] His father probably didn’t go to Eton, perhaps his father isn’t even British, he won his place on merit alone, and perhaps he isn’t paying a penny for the privilege of going to the most famous school in Britain.
[00:19:08] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Eton College.
[00:19:12] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:17] I should say that you can actually visit the school, you can go on a tour of the college during the summer months, so if you are in London between May and September and you would like to peek inside the most famous school in the country, then you can do that.
[00:19:33] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:37] Had you heard about Eton College before?
[00:19:39] Are there private schools in your country? And what do you think about them?
[00:19:44] Can they sometimes be a vehicle for social change, or are they something that perpetuates social inequality and should be abolished?
[00:19:52] I know we have loads of current and ex teachers, so I would particularly like to know what you think.
[00:19:59] As always, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:08] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:13] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
[00:00:00] Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:00:11] The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:20] I'm Alastair Budge, and today is part two of our three part series where we will explore British high society.
[00:00:28] As a reminder, in part one we talked about the titles of the British aristocracy: Duke, Earl, Viscount and so on.
[00:00:38] In part three we are going to look at the real lives of the people who waited on British aristocrats, their servants.
[00:00:45] And today we are going to look at where they went to school. Eton College, the most famous school in Britain.
[00:00:54] OK then, let’s get right into it.
[00:00:57] If you have to think back to your school years, perhaps someone from your school went on to some important job or position in society.
[00:01:07] Perhaps someone from your school wrote a well-known book, had a hit single, or went into business and made a lot of money.
[00:01:16] Perhaps you went to school with an actor, a football player, someone who is now a famous YouTuber.
[00:01:23] Maybe someone from your school went into politics, perhaps they even became Prime Minister or President of your country.
[00:01:32] For most people it is unlikely, but for a student at Eton College, it is almost a given, it is a certainty.
[00:01:43] This one school has produced 20 Prime Ministers, countless politicians, playwrights, actors, journalists, economists, historians, princes and kings.
[00:01:57] You will no doubt have heard of many of them.
[00:02:00] Princes William and Harry. George Orwell, the author of 1984 and Animal Farm, Guy Burgess, who you might remember from our mini-series on The Cambridge Five.
[00:02:12] The explorers Ranulph Fiennes and Bear Grylls.
[00:02:16] Actors such as Damian Lewis, who you might know from Homeland or Band of Brothers.
[00:02:22] Eddie Redmayne, who you might remember as Stephen Hawking from The Theory of Everything.
[00:02:28] Or Dominic West, who you might know as McNulty from The Wire.
[00:02:34] This one school has produced more public figures than any other in the UK, and in today’s episode we are going to lift the curtain on why.
[00:02:46] To start off, I want to tell you about a confusion in the English language, and a confusion that is specific to the UK.
[00:02:57] In the UK, there are state schools, government schools. Every child in the UK has the right to a free education provided by the government, they have the right to go to one of these schools.
[00:03:10] And there are also private schools, schools which are not free, and in many cases cost tens of thousands of Euros a year to attend. Some of these are “boarding schools”, where students don’t just study at the school; they sleep and spend weekends at the school as well.
[00:03:32] The confusing thing is that the most expensive and most prestigious private schools are called public schools.
[00:03:42] And right at the top of the list of the most prestigious public schools in the UK is Eton College, which teaches around 1,350 students aged between 13 and 18.
[00:03:57] Now, we are going to divide this episode into three parts.
[00:04:02] First we’ll talk about the history of Eton, as it has a lot of history, and it is rather interesting.
[00:04:09] Then we’ll talk about what life at Eton is actually like, as I’d be pretty confident that it is very different from the experience you had at school.
[00:04:19] And finally we’ll talk about how Eton has adapted and evolved over the years, and what the future might look like.
[00:04:28] Right, first off, some history.
[00:04:31] The school was founded in the year 1440 by King Henry VI.
[00:04:37] The king chose a small grassy area on the River Thames for his new school, which was to be just north of Windsor Castle, and is around 20 kilometres to the west of London.
[00:04:50] And the school is still there today, with many of the original buildings still standing.
[00:04:56] In fact, if you ever fly into London Heathrow Airport from the west, you will fly right over Eton College; it’s only a few kilometres away from the country’s busiest airport.
[00:05:10] Now, it might be the most exclusive school in the country, but when it was first founded the King ensured that it had space for 70 so-called “poor boys” who could live at and attend the school free of charge, without paying anything.
[00:05:29] Other boys could go to the school for free, but they would have to pay for their accommodation.
[00:05:36] This was the case when it was founded, in 1440, and interestingly enough, it is still broadly the case today.
[00:05:45] Approximately 20% of the students are given some form of financial assistance, and around 8% don’t pay anything at all. We’ll talk more about this later on.
[00:05:59] To this day boys sleep and study at the school, living in “boarding houses”.
[00:06:06] And, in case you thought it was a slip of the tongue, I did mean “boys”, not “boys and girls”. Eton is one of the few remaining public schools in the UK that doesn’t allow girls.
[00:06:19] Some things, fortunately, have changed.
[00:06:22] When the school first opened the language of instruction was not English, not French, not Old English but….Latin.
[00:06:32] And for the boys who went there, it was a pretty harsh existence.
[00:06:39] According to the Eton website, “The school day began at 5am with prayers, before lessons began at 6am. Lessons finally finished at 8pm, and there was a single hour of play allowed each day. There were two holidays in the year, at Christmas and in the summer, although the boys did not go home at Christmas.”
[00:07:03] Imagine that, you would arrive at the school in September, you would not leave until the following July. You would spend 7 days a week there, for 10 months of the year, and you would rise at 5 o’ clock in the morning and not finish studying until 8 o’ clock in the evening.
[00:07:23] It must have been pretty intense.
[00:07:25] Soon enough, this school became the “go-to” school for the British aristocracy.
[00:07:32] Boys were educated there, in this tiny bubble of society where they spent five years with boys who came from similar backgrounds.
[00:07:42] Firstly, this was because it was expensive. We’ll talk about exactly how much it costs in a minute, but the price to go there was out of reach for all but the richest in society.
[00:07:55] Secondly it was because you had to be accepted, and for many years, your probability of being accepted was determined not by you and your abilities but by who your parents were.
[00:08:09] And in most cases, who your father was.
[00:08:13] It helped if your father had gone to Eton himself, and as recently as 1960, 60% of the boys at Eton had fathers who had also gone to the school.
[00:08:26] I should say that this number is now down to 20%, but it still gives you some idea of how traditional the place is, and how it educated generation after generation of the same family.
[00:08:41] Another particularly traditional part of life at Eton is the uniform, the clothes that boys are required to wear.
[00:08:50] Now, wearing a uniform at a school in Britain is not unusual; in fact, most schools do require it, both state and private.
[00:09:00] But the uniform for Eton is something else, it takes formality to an entirely new level.
[00:09:09] Until 1948 boys were required to wear a top hat. And this requirement was only removed because of rationing in the post-war period, not because of any great modernisation.
[00:09:26] Today, boys still need to wear a black three-piece suit with long tails, and they wear a starched stiff collar with a white “tie”.
[00:09:38] If you close your eyes and imagine dressing up a 15 year old boy as an 18th century English aristocrat, you have probably imagined something very similar to the official uniform of Eton College.
[00:09:52] Now, one thing that we haven’t talked about yet is the actual quality of the tuition at Eton, about the schooling itself.
[00:10:02] It is widely known as one of the best schools in the country.
[00:10:07] The exam results that students get are very good, a high proportion go to the best universities in the country, and, as you can see from the lengthy list of famous ex Etonians, famous old boys of the school, lots go on to success in everything from business to politics to acting.
[00:10:27] As to the question of “why”, or how can one school achieve such brilliant results, there are differing theories.
[00:10:37] One is that these are boys who typically come from very privileged backgrounds anyway, so they have the family connections and wealth to give them a head start, in a way that most children do not.
[00:10:51] Another is that going to a school with children that often come from rich and successful families is bound to give a child the sense that they can achieve anything, even if they didn’t come from this kind of background themselves.
[00:11:06] To quote an article that was written in Eton’s student magazine by a 16-year-old pupil at the school, “Strain every nerve, parents of Britain, to send your son to this educational establishment… Exercise your freedom of choice because in this way you will imbue your son with the most important thing, a sense of his own importance.”
[00:11:31] That 16-year-old pupil, by the way, the author of the article was Boris Johson, who would go on to be a British Prime Minister.
[00:11:40] Now, what is undeniable even to the school’s biggest critics is that the quality of tuition at Eton, the quality of teachers, is incredibly high.
[00:11:51] The student to teacher ratio is 8 to 1, meaning that there is one teacher for every 8 students.
[00:12:00] In standard British schools this ratio is 16.4 to one, which means that Eton has more than double the number of teachers per student.
[00:12:12] And the teachers at the school are very high quality: it is one of the most desirable schools in the country, and the pay is very high, with more than 40 teachers being paid over £100,000, so that’s around €120,000.
[00:12:29] For reference, the average salary for a teacher in the UK is £42,000, so just under €50,000.
[00:12:38] Now, as to the question of how Eton is able to pay its teachers so much, well here’s where I tell you how much it costs for a boy to go to Eton.
[00:12:50] There are three terms per year, and each term currently costs £16,666, so that’s £50,000 a year, just for the tuition. And with five years in total plus the cost of the uniform, trips, additional classes and so on, it will end up being closer to £300,000, so that’s around €350,000.
[00:13:20] It is, to state the obvious, a lot of money, so much that you have to be right in the top earning bracket to be able to afford a place.
[00:13:30] But winning a place at Eton is now about much more than how many zeroes you, or rather, your parents, have on your bank balance.
[00:13:41] There is a very tough application process.
[00:13:44] Every boy needs to apply, then have an interview at the age of 11. If they impress the interviewer, they will be offered a place, contingent on getting excellent grades at an exam they take at the age of 13.
[00:14:00] No longer can you simply say who your father is, cough up the money and expect to be welcomed with open arms; you need to be academically capable to be offered a place;
[00:14:11] Indeed, in many cases, you don’t need to pay anything at all to win a place.
[00:14:17] Eton’s stated aim is to encourage applications from candidates with as diverse a range of backgrounds as possible who meet the academic standard required for entry.
[00:14:28] Your ability to pay the fees should not, in theory, be an obstacle, and as you heard, 20% of boys at the school don’t pay full fees, with one in every 13 boys paying nothing at all.
[00:14:43] And this is one of the contradictions of Eton, or at least a contradiction in the public eye.
[00:14:51] On the one hand it is seen as an exclusive club where only the richest may apply, a school which perpetuates social injustice by giving an unfair advantage to boys who are already privileged enough.
[00:15:05] British tabloids use Eton as the quintessential example of upper class privilege, a school that perpetuates social inequality by offering a superior education to the one available to 99.99% of the population.
[00:15:22] But on the other hand, Eton is now much more meritocratic than it is given credit for. It gives the opportunity for a first-class quality of education to boys who would otherwise not have received it.
[00:15:36] The school will happily offer a completely free place, worth many hundreds of thousands of Euros, to a clever and ambitious young boy who would otherwise almost certainly have received an inferior education.
[00:15:50] Sure, it only does this for a very small number of boys in the grand scheme of things, but on a micro level, for the boys that win these free places, this will in all likelihood be a life changing experience in terms of social mobility and life opportunities.
[00:16:08] And, interestingly enough, the type of boy who goes to Eton and pays the full fees has also changed significantly over the past twenty to thirty years.
[00:16:20] Even 30 years ago, it was expensive but significantly more affordable than it is today, it was around £12,000 a year in 1995 versus £50,000 a year today. Yes, expensive, but still affordable to many “old money” families.
[00:16:41] So, it was full of the sons of old Etonians, old boys of the school, who you were, who your father was, this was the deciding factor.
[00:16:53] The fact that it is now so expensive has really priced this type of parent out, the parent that might have historically had lots of money, land, and so on, but not the almost million Euros in cash that it does today to educate two boys at the school.
[00:17:11] And this has changed the type of boy that you will find at the school.
[00:17:15] Gone, or at least substantially reduced, are these “old money” types, and there has been an increase of boys from families that are able to pay the fees but might not have come from a traditional Eton background themselves: immigrant families, wealthy Asian or Middle Eastern parents, and so on.
[00:17:35] This is a big change for the school; if you were to look at an Eton school photo from any time before the 1960s, you would have been presented with a wall of white faces.
[00:17:49] In fact, the first black boy to complete his studies at Eton ended up writing a book about the terrible racist treatment he received, and this was in 1969.
[00:18:02] Nowadays, 20% of the students are Black or Asian, which is, in fact, a higher percentage than the UK average.
[00:18:12] So, to wrap things up, yes Eton College is still where the British elite is educated.
[00:18:20] There is, statistically speaking, most probably a future British Prime Minister studying there right now, putting on his stiff collar, adjusting his coat tails, and perhaps even reciting Latin verses in his room at night.
[00:18:37] But this “elite” Etonian from 2023 is a very different type of elite compared to his predecessor from 1923, or even from 2003.
[00:18:50] His father probably didn’t go to Eton, perhaps his father isn’t even British, he won his place on merit alone, and perhaps he isn’t paying a penny for the privilege of going to the most famous school in Britain.
[00:19:08] OK then, that is it for today's episode on Eton College.
[00:19:12] I hope it's been an interesting one, and that you've learnt something new.
[00:19:17] I should say that you can actually visit the school, you can go on a tour of the college during the summer months, so if you are in London between May and September and you would like to peek inside the most famous school in the country, then you can do that.
[00:19:33] As always, I would love to know what you thought about this episode.
[00:19:37] Had you heard about Eton College before?
[00:19:39] Are there private schools in your country? And what do you think about them?
[00:19:44] Can they sometimes be a vehicle for social change, or are they something that perpetuates social inequality and should be abolished?
[00:19:52] I know we have loads of current and ex teachers, so I would particularly like to know what you think.
[00:19:59] As always, you can head right into our community forum, which is at community.leonardoenglish.com and get chatting away to other curious minds.
[00:20:08] You've been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
[00:20:13] I'm Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I'll catch you in the next episode.
[END OF EPISODE]
