Why Your Child Will Never Be Prime Minister!
Roger Philby
Talent Management Expert | Unlocking Business Potential | Strategic Advisor on Leadership and Go-To-Market Talent
Like me, you'e probably thought, David Cameron, bit posh, hardly representative of my family, the people I work with and the people I bump in to going about my life. Got me thinking, who actually could be Prime Minister of this glorious Island? Would my children have a chance of making it? Turns out my eldest daughter might and the only reason that might be true, is she may well go to Cambridge university. Did you know 41 Prime Ministers out of the 55 this country has elected, were from Oxbridge (for the uninitiated that's code for went to Oxford or Cambridge University). Well that's not strictly true, if you want a genuine chance of being Prime Minister you should send your child to Oxford, 27 attended Oxford whilst a mere 14 attended Cambridge.
It gets worse, turns out you also need to go to Eton, 19 of our Prime Ministers did, including David Cameron. Harrow come in at a pifling 8 Prime Ministers, won't be sending the kids there then.
Currently of the 119 government ministers, 66 percent went to private school, compared to just 7% of the population as a whole.
A fairly cool economist called Jim Flynn came up with a model that defines something called Human Capitalisation, or the percentage of a given community whose potential has been unlocked. He calculated that the human capitalisation of African-American men in senior roles in the Fortune 100 was less than 16%! Of all the African-American men with the intellectual capability of holding down a senior role in the Fortune 100, the system of education, hiring and development implemented by US society and corporations accesses just 16% of them!
So what do we think the human capitalisation rate of state school educated women in to government is? Or even state educated men? Low d'you reckon? Well we both know it isn't high!
Why is this important? Who cares that your child will never be prime minister? Well there is the social injustice and the fact that our state school system is being run by people who've never experienced it or there will never be a prime minister who will know what it's like to be schooled like the other 93% of the population. But let's face it, we aren't going to change that, we should but we won't.
However the principle is an important one, my question if you are a business leader reading this is, what are you doing about ensuring that your human capitalisation rate is high? How are you ensuring that you are through your recruitment exploiting every possible avenue for talent? How are you ensuring the people you currently have working for you are delivering their full potential every day? In one example a FTSE 100 organisation had a human capitalisation rate for women in to their salesforce of circa 8%. Let's just say their recruitment process was not conducive to identifying the potential within the female population. Overhauling their approach took their female capitalisation rate to 41% and their business performance through the roof.
What we are seeing in our data is that organisations with a higher capitalisation rate are, experiencing higher performance as a benchmark in their industry. More diverse the talent, the higher the performance.
Which brings us back to the prime Minister, if we are finding a direct correlation between human capitalisation rate and performance, it's bad news for him and unfortunately us.
For another angle on this, I loved this article from Toby Young in the Spectator
HR and Employment Law consultancy
9 年90% of Judges are from fee paying schools - so 90% from 7% ! I went to state school and occassionally mix with old Etonians they're fine lifes definitely easier when you inherit a few million. Social mobility is important for performance sake to succeed you need to go around any poshness test or school ties barriers create and run a business or develop property etc it call still be done
Senior Director at Gartner / Chartered Psychologist and Psychotherapist - "passionate about applying contemporary psychology to transform workplaces and lives."
9 年Great read Roger! We of course need to be careful/clear on what we mean by talent as well. To be human is to be biased, however we need to make sure potentials and opportunity in all walks of life are realised. We also need to recognise that diversity, in the richest sense of the word (psychological), is necessary, in order that businesses can adapt, survive and be sustainable, because today's 'talent' may not be what is required tomorrow. Matt.
Freelance Training Consultant at The Talent Labs (Formerly The Firm)
9 年Whenever I see articles like this, I'm always prone to wonder what sort of world would we be in if it didn't matter what university you got into? Why would you need to aspire to do well at school? Why would your parents need to aspire to do well to pay the fees that give you access to private education in the first place?
Helping Notting Hill Genesis achieve its purpose through attract the best talent
9 年Great blog Roger - does make a point really that there is no real war for talent but because of various in built biases - many organisations just dont know how to spot it
Talent Management Expert | Unlocking Business Potential | Strategic Advisor on Leadership and Go-To-Market Talent
9 年Mike, thanks for your comments, not sure I was stating that the Prime Ministers were or were not state educated prior to University...more that they were Oxbridge educated, Thatcher attended Oxford, Brown attended Edinburgh, Major didn't attend University (an anomaly) at all. Of the last 19 Prime Ministers 12 were Oxbridge educated and 2 attended Russell Group Uni's, the rest didn't attend Uni at all! "The greatest living Englishman", Churchill, didn't attend University at all...maybe there is hope! So your girls will be fine, as long as they attend Oxbridge or at least a Russell Group University. For a high percentage of state educated children, getting there is the big feat. For example the Social Mobility & Poverty Commission concluded from it's research that the odds of a child at a state secondary school who is eligible for free school meals in Year 11 – the final year before they begin their sixth form studies for university admission – going to Oxbridge by the age of 19 is almost 2,000:1 against. By contrast, the odds of a privately educated child being admitted to Oxbridge are 20 to 1.