Thought I might try a tabloid headline for maximum impact 
Am pretty surprised no one in the mainstream media picked this one up.
Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North, Labour)
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what proportion of new recruits to the Army at (a) soldier and (b) officer level previously attended state school.Andrew Robathan (South Leicestershire, Conservative)
The proportion of soldier recruits that had previously attended a state school is not held centrally and could be provided only at disproportionate cost.Including the most recent intake of officer cadets to the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, in January 2013, 53.5% of the UK educated intake over the last 12 months came from state schools. While the remainder will have come from independent schools, it is possible that some will have attended a state school at an earlier point in their education.
Accepting issues of Army officers children following in their parents footsteps (not unusual) who will have benefited from CEA and therefore an independent school and no figures for non UK educated officer cadets.
A couple of points to consider;
- If the Army has the figures to hand for the educational background of its officers, why not other ranks
- About 5 to 7% of pupils in the UK attend independent schools yet represent just over 45% of the Sandhurst intake for the last year
I am not one for social engineering, preferential treatment or bemoaning the lack of social mobility in general but this seems disproportionate.
Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Does it matter as long as the leadership is effective?
Would also be interesting to see a breakdown by Regiment/Corps and even the same figures for the RAF and RN branches.
I am a Governor at a challenging state school with a TA Centre opposite – who have in the past been quite keen to get involved – when the question came up it would be fair to say that the Staff were not keen to facilitate this…
My Son is going private; his form Teacher is a lifelong Volunteer Reservist…
Completely anecdotal, wholly unrepresentative – but might have some bearing.
At what point did those from “independent” schools (which I assume includes the remaining grammar schools) become “posh boys”?
What’s your point?
Dont the toffs have a tradition to upkeep? One son for the family business/estate, one for the city, and one goes in the army?
Or an heir and a spare, with the spare going in the army?
Old money sees the army as a tradition and a proper career. New money would rather die than have a son in the army – it would be a failure to them.
Tony Blair loved sending people to war, can you imagine him sending his own sons?
And perhaps 20% of that 46.5% attending independent schools received some form of financial assistance – scholarships or bursaries. People have fewer children now; it’s not such an impossibility for two working parents from modest backgrounds to put a single kid into an independent school for a few years. It’s an incorrect assumption that all children out of the state system are chinless, titled heirs.
Probably the biggest influence on those numbers is the ethos of the schools and the families who send their kids to them. Children who get into independent schools -from whatever social background- will ultimately be better equipped to become officers, or managers, simply because of the positive attitudes towards education that surrounds them.
Speaking as someone who’s holidays involve driving only to relatives since the first of his two children started at private school, I’m rather annoyed at this silly cow. Surely she should be asking why the state schools, the ones she actually has some responsibility for, are not providing or encouraging their pupils to be able for a forces career?
Misdirection is the answer. She’s trying to distract everyone else by spouting a bit of class war. Punch back twice as hard: plenty of state schools failing to either educate their kids or doing their best to discourage service in the forces. Some in Kingston Upon Hull even, perhaps….
BB,
“Children who get into independent schools – from whatever social background – will ultimately be better equipped to become officers, or managers, simply because of the positive attitudes towards education that surrounds them.”
Well said.
In addition it’s important to remember that the fact that one went to an “independent” school is rarely one’s own choice – it would have been the choice of one’s parents. So those parents a) can afford it, and b) value the investment. It does not take a toff to do this. It fact it’s likely to be any high level professional that can see further than the end of his/her nose and see the “bigger picture”.
Something else to bear in mind is in which nation were these recruits educated – that affects cost and the potential social class of the parent.
I know of several state schools that can only be half-arsed to teach any forms of civics and have even banned cadet organisations (ACF, ATC, SCC, CCF) from recruiting let alone the full-time or reserve military; so the general trend would not surprise me.
However I’m curious where Blair’s academies (which can be in quite deprived areas) fit into this return – are they counted as state, because they continue to receive central funding; or are they counted as independent, as they are self-governing & outside of Local Education Authority control?
NaB, no real point, and the title is just a bit of fun, this is a blog, not a defence writing masterclass
My observation is merely this, the leadership of the Army has a disproportionate proportion of people from independent (fee paying) schools.
I also expect the higher up you go the more pronounced it gets.
Now there may be a million reasons why, hence me asking the question, but the fact remains
However much we might dislike the person asking the question or perhaps the political motive behind it, it still remains something valid to ask and equally worth discussing
This will open up a can of worms not necessarily associated with the main theme of Think Defence. As a teacher of both independent and state schools, who has heavily involved in the CCF (Army and RN) and also went to Sandhurst, Cranwell & Dartmouth (albeit this as a CCF Officer) I may have an insight into this issue. It all boils down to what the aims of the differing education systems are. Independent schools by their nature and links to the CCF do tend to produce young people with the capacity to take on the demanding role of being an officer in today’s forces. It has been reduced dramatically as more state school students are accepted and the Forces are to be complimented on their efforts to open this field up.
There has also been a historical link up between independent schools and the services.
But the main issue is to do the education systems and what their end product is. At my last independent school it was all about producing well rounded young people with skills in a wide variety of areas not just academic. In the last state school I taught in, which set up its own CCF unit it’s main aims were academic performance and league tables and the proportion of students in the CCF compared to the school population was about 1/10th of that of the independent schools. So independent schools by their nature tend to produce more students with officer potential than their state school equivalents.
The cadet force units which are run outside school, should also be recognised by the work that they do with young people, but they follow a different syllabus to the CCF courses operated, and are set up to provide soldiers, sailors and airman for the Armed Services (no disrespect here).
I also was part of the RN Dartmouth Summer Camp and for a number of years was a Divisional Officer in charge of 30 cadets from all services, CCF, ACF, Sea Cadet and Scouts). So I have had the pleasure of working with all types of cadets and each bring their own unique capability and abilities to the table. I respect anyone in the cadet movement and there is a need for recognition of what they do.
Finally the percentage used is about right as this 5% of the school population do get most of the high scoring A Level results. Without the independent sector a lot of ‘difficult’ subjects like Science and Maths would be in real trouble today.
Finally it should not be about a debate between independent schools and state schools (that is for another forum) but getting the best young people to join these services and do their bit for the country. Britain has been accused in the past for having a poor ‘officer’ class, I would say that this is not true although you can always find poor officers wherever you go, but that is the same as poor teachers, poor soldiers etc. However, we have managed to produce some find leaders in the past and present, and I know that some of the students I have had the pleasure to teach and know are doing great things as leaders in the field.
Now I am prepared to be shot down in flames!
Good post Illendil,
I would make this point though, the Army (and other services) have suffered from poor leadership over the last couple of decades and I think is well overdue for its modern day Cardwell moment so
I would say this is absolutely relevant to Think Defence by the way, we aren’t just container anoraks you know
I imagine it’s also related to university intakes – A higher proportion of Private school students go onto university compared to their state school counterparts.
Many Private schools encourage the army as a legitimate career choice – as opposed to something you do for a few years if you cannot get anything else (case in point my nephew was actively told by his career teacher that he should set his aspirations higher than joining the army – suggesting he looked at media careers due to his art / drawing / computer skills and subjects he chose to study.)
I was born in 1965 on a council estate. My family didn’t have a car or a phone in the house and we never went on a holiday. However, I want our armed forces, and indeed our public services, manned by the best people we can get regardless of where they went to school. If 100% of our officers went to Eaton it wouldn’t bother me in the slightest. If I had my way, every state school would have a CCF.
no simple explanations evidently but the stats are still pretty damning.
if it was all about independent schools producing better leadership candidates then wouldn’t one expect the proportion of more senior officers from independent schools to be largely even across the services ? In 2006 the NAO reported 42% of Army students on ACSC were from independent schools, against 30% for the Navy and 25% for the RAF. I doubt the gap has closed that much since then. Nine of the top ten most senior Army officers came from indepdendent schools. Over 60% of army bursaries and scholarships went to students in the independent sector.
has much changed since then ?
At the end of the day it’s to conclude anything but that the Posh Boys are in charge and are broadly happy with the situation.
On the counter argument of course one could argue whether it matters at all ? I have always thought that the idea of the Army having to reflect 100% the population it represents was an easy soundbite rather than operational necessity. Having said that I don’t think a top management team formed through a Chap-ocracy and Capbadge mafia has necessarily served the Army very well of late
Bangin post Twecky
Its easy to fall into easy judgements, lazy thinking and over generalisation but this just doesn’t look right does it
On the argument put forward that independent schools necessarily provide better officer class recruits because of “a more positive attitude to education” etc…
Well, I’m definitely no socialist revolutionary but I do think this has been dis proven.
The one time in British history where the army promoted from the ranks, purely on merit, ignoring educational background, and social standing, it came up with Cromwell’s new model army, one of, if not the most effective field army in our history.
On the other hand WW1, I’d expect, had a near 100% privately educated to state officer ratio. Where the officer class performed woefully.
20 years later the private school educated likes of Von Manstein, Model, and Paulus were consistently outperformed by the peasant’s sons Rokossovsky, Chuikov, Vatutin, etc…
Of course there will be lots of examples the other way. But the fact is that there is no evidence to suggest that an army that recruits it’s officers from private schools or from a particular class is any more effective than one that recruits and promotes purely on merit. If anything an argument can be made that the latter is more effective.
My old ex-SCC unit drew most of its members from 2 very large council estates in a city noted for its low wages and over the last 3 to 4 decades poor social fabric. None of the kids in my ten years or more involved ever went on to become an officer in either the RN or Army. But we did have two lads who went on to become barrister and a GP. The first came from an upper working class home; the latter from a council estate. I will qualify that with from a nice area and upper working class too. From that I conclude if they had both chosen the forces (and knowing them) that they would have made good officers. My exposure to the office class of both the RN and Army would lead me to believe that neither go out of their way to employ idiots. (With the exception of one brigadier, but that’s another story!) The sad fact is the sink council house estates of the UK aren’t filled with potential admirals or generals, or for that matter Einsteins or Newtons, just waiting for the right education or social system to draw it out. Rather like some exotic organic compound in a rain forest that can cure cancer. That those with potential do rise and enter the professional classes does perhaps indicate that the system with have in terms of social mobility does work.
The RAF and RN have always been far more technical then the Army – they have traditionally had different priorities than Army when it looks for its Officers. They require certain skills or abilities that the Army does not. This makes them inherently more of a meritocracy than the Army.
It would be interesting to see the breakdown in of State/Independent School background by rank. As others have suggested, I think the proportion of senior ranks would skew more heavily towards individuals from Independent school backgrounds.
It would also be interesting to see the breakdown for the different Regiments and Corps. I imagine the the more technical units are more representative, whereas as certain regiments (*cough* Household Division *cough*) are definitely more skewed towards individuals from certain schools and backgrounds.
Over 50% from state schools is a definite sign of progress. I expect this number to continue to rise, but I would suspect that it won’t ever match the general split of State/Independent school background in the general population. I think more of an issue is the proportion of servicemen from different racial and/or cultural backgrounds.
The armed forces have come a long way in terms of diversity. They certainly seem to do a better job than our political parties.
Hasn’t it been argued that one of the reasons for our decline was too many of the “officer class” were killed in WW1?
We live in an age where HM Queen’s grandson and boys and girls from council estates go to fight the wars started by the middle classes. Where was Tony Blair’s Euan when the SHTF in Afghanistan? In Washington DC……
@Alan Garner: A classic nonsense rears its head. The mass British Armies of the First and Second World Wars were highly egalitarian, with a very large number of junior officers from non-public school backgrounds commissioned from the ranks. Think on, if you have an army in the millions, a few hundred thousand public school types are *not* going to be sufficient to provide 20+ officers per major unit, especially when one takes into account the alarmingly high casualty rate among junior officers.
As to independent schools being over-represented in the officer corps, possibly. Why would that be? Are the proportions of independent school pupils attending AOSB similar to the proportions of same passing – i.e. is it a case of not enough non-”posh boys” going for commissions in the first place, or is there an institutional bias toward same?
I know that I spent 22 years in the Regular Army and was never commissioned and I don’t suppose I ever wasted even a millisecond wondering where any of my officers went to school. There were plenty of other, more immediate things about them that were far more important – and generally, in all that time, even when things got noisy, or even fluffy, they were every bit as professional and competent as the men they had the honour to command.
Hasn’t it been argued that one of the reasons for our decline was too many of the “officer class” were killed in WW1?
Maybe in the officer’s mess!
Unfortunately, in some cases, the claret swigging rosy faced general issuing orders from a château 20 miles behind the lines while giving more of a shit about his own reputation than the lives of his men, is all too true.
The consensus of opinion on the main failures of WW1 was lack of delegation of command from general’s behind the lines to commanders on the ground. The fact that more British generals died that French or German was, in my opinion, more to do with a residual chivalric ethos left over from the height of empire rather than generals leading by example. That in itself is an advert for a more meritocratic army to me.
I could make a couple of points. Firstly, as the Army has got smaller, service in it is very much a minority interest, and this will tend to skew entrants to those who already have a connection via family..which says those posh boys
Secondly, I have today dropped off my 10 year old at a private school for an interview. All over reception were posters of boys lugging a log through a very large pool of muddy water looking tired, with “Leadership course for year 11″ on them. I’ve never seen anything like this at a state school…….
My experience as a serving RN junior officer has been of far more State educated officers than private. I’m not sure that I can see a correlation between where they were educated and how they/we perform. I suspect that there isn’t. I don’t know about the RAF, or the Army, but the RN is still very much officered by the state educated, middle class, suburban dwelling young men (and women now), that it has been since WWII.
Regards
Andrew
wf
Bang on.
Poverty of asparation is a major problem with many state schools.
My daughters school is in the top 200 in the country, state or private, (and remember many of the private, and state schoolson that list are selective, my daughters is not).
The big difference between it and the local shit street yob factories*? The staff drive the kids like RSM’s to strive for the best they can do be it Oxbridge or industry, etc.
*Schools like I went to, a Secondry Modern:- I got the school prize! That tells you all your need to know about it I got the F**king school prize! I think it was for walking upright and learning to use a knife and fork:- and not on the kid sitting next to me.
@AG – Whilst the jury remains out, this popular view of WWI has been subject to considerable revision in recent years – with studies focussing on everything from casualties amongst British Generals “leading from the front” which you quote – to the overall military efficiency achieved by the British Army by 1918 – by which time some historians believe it was the best in the world, and certainly the only one capable of sustained offensive action on the Western Front.
The more balanced view is that the reality of industrial warfare threw all those involved into some disarray as to how to proceed – terrible mistakes were made on all sides with horrible consequences – but in the end the British Army pretty much won the war…
Not that any of this is relevant to meritocracy in HMAF today, which I believe most people here would support…the more compelling issue to me is the numbers of anecdotes (starting with my own) that suggest that many State System Teachers dislike the idea of soldiering as a career and discourage people from pursuing it.
Just a couple more anecdotes – in the primary sector staffs tend to be overwhelmingly female, to the extent that people do worry a good deal about male role models for boys especially in tough areas. However when the possibility of encouraging retired NCOs or Officers to look at Teaching as future career, the overwhelming knee-jerk response was horror and derision; the overwhelming assumption that soldiers were crazed sociopaths who should be kept away from Children at all costs.
And finally, as a student thirty years ago when current school leaders were being trained the PGCE course at my University hounded the one Student who was in the University TA Unit off “their” course, and took a leading role in a campaign to get the Unit itself shut down.
And these people are now running Schools…
@H. The mass armies of WW1 and II were not “highly” egalitarian they were simply more egalitarian relative to previous ones. And that was down to the fact that, as you say, they were “mass”. More spaces to fill meant more opportunities for genuine talent to fill them, necessity being the mother of invention meant that talent wasn’t always privately educated or “posh”. Do you really believe that Lord Rupert VC would have promoted an oik from the ranks over an Eton graduate fresh from Sandhurst if he actually had that choice?
Britain isn’t run by the aristocracy any more, as it was then, and I’m sure British army officers will be commissioned and promoted more and more on merit. And, like yourself, fewer and fewer rank and file will care about background. But to say that was truly the case in the world wars in rather disingenuous.
@ Alan Garner:
‘the consensus of opinion’? And whose would that be? The general population of the UK, whose main source of knowledge is Blackadder? Or the historians? The vast majority of whom ascribe the stalemate on the Western Front to the fact that defensive armament had progressed faster than offensive until 1918, when funnily enough, trench warfare ceased.
@GNB. On the contrary, more and more consensus is forming around the popular view of an inflexible high command in WW1 leading to rigid tactics and strategy exacerbated by the invention of newer technologies like the machine gun, barbed wire, improvements in ration storage etc. We see the failings of the British generals because we’re British but most European armies suffered, to a greater or lesser degree, from the same problems of not enough care being taken to minimize casualties. My assertion, I don’t think unreasonably, was that the class bound nature of recruitment and promotion contributed to this. That’s why, in my opinion meritocracy in armed forces matters.
On the matter of the schools question, I’d agree that the, often left-wing, nature of state school teachers and administrators affects the overall number of officer recruits, I’d also say that, while someone said the majority of officers in the RN were predominately not upper class, how many non upper class recruits have made it to the very top? In fact, since the war, how many non upper class new recruits have made it to say the top 5 jobs in any of the services? I’d be surprised if it was even 1. That failure to break through the closed shop at the very top does rather play to the argument of the lefty teachers encouraging state pupils against enrolling.
This is fairly interesting although not at all surprising. But much more interesting would be the break-down. What is the proportion in the infantry regiments and the Paras, still very much the fighting backbone of the army? Has there ever been a state-educated officer cadet in the Household Cavalry or the Guards? It’s overwhelmingly from these regiments that the future top brass are selected. And then, what proportion of these officer cadets are graduates of Russell Group universities? I suspect many of the privately educated officer cadets are coming from schools that are, academically speaking, inferior to the better (selective) state sector.
I’m sorry Alan but no credible historian is saying anything of that kind at all.
They generally agree on two things about British Generals; 1) that you musn’t view the war from a modern perspective. You have to view it through the lense of the time. In the regard the Germans typically proved no better than our commanders, at least on the Western front, largely because none of them had ever encountered warfare of this kind before. 2) As the war progressed, British tactics actually developed very rapidly between operations, to the extent that later operations took on quite a sophisticated nature (for the time).
@AG: Again, too much Blackadder. The British Army in 1914-18 was a ferment of new thinking and innovation and embracing of technology – which was what led to the eventual creation of a true combined arms doctrine (once communications allowed realtime tasking of artillery and, to an extent, air power) – and an Army fighting by it which beat the Germans fair and square.
The officers who led that Army came from all levels of society; as you say it was a mass Army. The current British Army is not a mass Army, it is a small professional force, with a generally high level of IQ and educational qualification in the ranks as well as in the officers’ mess.
Without prying too hard – and if it’s not my business, do please ignore me – have you ever served?
Also perhaps it should be pointed out that what the Chinese desperately want to replicate in the structure of their armed forces, because they think it is the key to why Anglophone armies do so well, is a core of independent thinking professional NCOs.
You’re quite right Chris. The British were credited with rapidly improving their tactics later in the war, even in the context of one battle. The invention of tanks and creeping barrage were excellent military innovations. I was however not commenting on the successes of the war only the failures and my own, and other expert opinions for them. If this was a thread about the good that British recruitment policies have done you could cite those as examples.
Just to try to avoid any arguments, I don’t have any expertise regarding current class ratios in the armed forces or how those forces recruit from private and state schools. All opinions on those subjects are those of a layman. I am, however, employed as a historian for a publishing company that writes, mostly, about military history. Any opinion, while still my own unless I quote others, is based, I hope, on “credible historians” and hopefully my boss agrees or I’m in bother. I’m told “it doesn’t do to have one’s credibility brought into question dear boy”.
I would imagine that the reason they have the officer data ready to hand is because it’s already centralised in the records at Sandhurst?
Would also be interesting to see a breakdown by Regiment/Corps and even the same figures for the RAF and RN branches.
Yes it would. Anecdotally, I’d expect the RN officer corps to be less posh than the Army and the RAF even less posh than the RN.
IXION said “Schools like I went to, a Secondary Modern:- I got the school prize!”
Aren’t you a solicitor or something? So how do you go from SM to a law degree. Doesn’t that show social mobility?
The trouble is the Left would have nothing to bang on about if the didn’t have equality or social mobility to bang on about. Look at Labour’s front bench as a glowing example of social mobility………
There was a guy at my school two classes below me who got 5 grade 1 CSEs, the “system” didn’t think him able to cope with O level work, and he now has his own architect’s practice.
a says “Yes it would. Anecdotally, I’d expect the RN officer corps to be less posh than the Army and the RAF even less posh than the RN.”
Back in the 19th century the Army was officered by the upper class and the RN by the middle classes.
“Hasn’t it been argued that one of the reasons for our decline was too many of the “officer class” were killed in WW1?”
Overall casualty figures were 1 in 8 for other ranks, 1 in 7 officers – but a lot of the leading public schools and Oxbridge lost 1 in 5. (source: chapter 2 of Mud, Blood and Poppycock by Gordon Corrigan which deal specifically with the (not very) Lost Generation – the whole book is well worth a read if your knowledge of WWI comes from Blackadder, it counters a lot of popular myths.)
Of course, you can argue that the top 1% of leaders are the ones that really make a difference – people like Rhodes, Carnegie, Weinstock and others – and they may well have been disproportionately knocked off within that 1 in 7 figure.
And certainly to start with, pretty much anyone who volunteered became an officer if they had been to university or grammar school, not least because they at least could read orders – something that wasn’t guaranteed among their men. It was a different world then.
Worth noting that it’s 7% of all kids go to private school but that goes up to 18% of those in sixth form.
On exam results, I can’t find the reference for the figures now, but it’s something like private schools account for 20% of all A-Levels taken and 50% of all pupils who get 3 A’s at A-Level (or is it 50% of all A’s at A-Level? It’s something like that). Private schools are also much more likely to do “hard” subjects – twice as likely to do sciences and three times more likely to do languages.
@AG – In the course of WW1 class relations in the Russian Army helped to provoke a Revolution, amongst the egalitarian French led to mutinies and standstill, and in Germany helped cook up the myth of “betrayal” and the poison thereby brewed. By contrast the British Army won the war, at least in part because it mastered the art of recruiting Officers from a much wider social group than it had done previously – especially from amongst Grammar School Boys.
Furthermore it learnt those lessons so well that it repeated the trick with Potential Officer Selection Courses in the next war, and they worked so well that Yank Academics from Harvard Business School picked up the idea and developed the Assessment Centre approach to graduate recruitment, used with great success by big companies for many years afterwards.
If anything, the pool of Potential Officers was subsequently narrowed by the abolition of the Grammar Schools which actually reversed social mobility in respect of everyone from Oxbridge Graduates and top Civil Servants to HMAF Officers and front-bench politicians.
And finally the Teachers I have met as a Governor in several schools for many years don’t discourage careers in HMAF because they fear their pupils will encounter a “Posh Ceiling”; they just don’t like Soldiers, mostly considering them to be both inherently dangerous and incredibly stupid.
I might add that Cromwell referred to “Plain Russet-Coated Captains”, who were mostly from the Gentry – comfortable landowners – if not necessarily rich. The kind of egalitarian ideas you ascribe to the New Model Army were aired at the Putney Debates, and by the Levellers and Diggers. Cromwell had most of them shot for Mutiny in the end.
@ El Sid
I just through “it” in. As I explained above I do have some real world insight into this topic.
@ All
I remember one year my old unit shared its week in the Bristol with a CCF unit. The latter were nearly a different species to our little “crew” in all manner of ways which I won’t go into now. But one of the things that really struck was the latter’s attitude. They were just confident; they sort of exuded it. We had cadets who needed to be pushed with the simplest of things. And I do mean the simplest of things. I watched the CCF unit rig Bosuns and head of up the Creek while we were still sorting out buoyancy aids. (Though me fellow staff were on the whole pretty dire so not entirely the kids’ fault.) They CCF in uniform (what are termed 4s now) were just immaculate; some of our kids looked like scarecrows even after staff helped them. The CCF both literally and figuratively sailed through the week. They were perhaps a bit arrogant, but as reflected at the time perhaps they had a right to be up to a point.
x
If you consider that constitutes Social mobility.
If you think me cursing my f**kwit, burn out, psycho teachers, every day, as I wasted 2 years of my life slogging thru FE college to get 5 O levels and 3 A levels. Then yes I was socially Mobile.
I considered it a betrayal of me and my generation.
AS for officers, being posh,I can’t really comment. But I have not been massively impressed by the superior intellectual prowess, they supposedly possess. Not all dick heads by any means, just not anything special.. I would think a long time before following some of them into battle.
I can opine that squadies intelligence really does need a fill up.
@ IXION
Well if the system failed you at one level it made up for it at the next. You aren’t stacking shelves at the local supermarket are you?
Saying that for all I know you could come from a family of High Court judges and QC’s and just being “a” solicitor isn’t up too much!
Part of the problem is the way that the Army conducts its selection process. I have watched the Regular Commissions Board at work and there is no doubt that many of the private school types do exude confidence and have had opportunities to exercise leadership, undertake adventurous training, travel widely, etc that their state school counterparts lack. What they sometimes lack in brain power is disguised by self confidence and a bevy of qualifications, thanks to the support they received from high quality teaching staff. The hub of the issue is that unlike the RN and RAF the Army still wants potential officers to be recommended by a regiment or corps. In practice this means that there is a tendency for some regiments (certainly in the Cavalry and the Guards) to be self-selecting. Regardless of what recruiting regulations may say, they prefer to take potential officers who have been to private schools, who have friends within the regiment and who will socially fit within what is really a large family. The state grammar school boy will have a job breaching this invisible barrier and as for the comprehensive school product from a council estate…
I once had an extended lunch in the Officers’ Mess of a cavalry regiment at Tidworth (no names, no packdrill) and while they were socially delightful, the differences were very apparent. For example the cashmere wooly-pullies knocked up by the regimental tailor and bought by their young officers at an extortionate price – and used for climbing in and out of tanks. I will always remember the expression on the face of a fellow guest who was invited to go shooting for game the next day – when he accepted, clearly under the impression that this meant a little rough shooting and was a free offer, the immediate response was ‘Oh, good, could you give me a cheque for £200 please?’ (and that is a true account). Fortunately I had already declined. And of course they were proud of their tradition of ‘no women in the mess’ (there was a separate back bar for them). This is in the recent past.
Some (not all) regiments still take the view that unless you have a family connection, the right social acquaintances and some private money to cover the rather large mess bills, you simply will be unable to fit in, no matter how good you are in a professional sense. It is simply a subtle form of discrimination in a very English kind of way. No-one will stop a boy from Gateshead Comprehensive applying to the Household Cavalry, but selection is not simply by ability, even assuming he has the leadership qualities which remain undeveloped by so many state schools. Hence you will tend to find the comprehensive-educated officers in the various corps and supporting arms. Since the senior leadership of the Army is predominately drawn from the Cavalry and Infantry it is hardly surprising that ‘posh boys’ tend to run the organisation and feel no impetus to change – after all it worked for them, didn’t it, and by definition proves that the right people have reached the top.
Though isn’t that the way of the world at all levels? It isn’t just the upper echelons who play “it is what, but who you know”?
@Fatman: it may have changed since my time, but although most candidates go via pre-RCB short courses with their regiment or corps, you could apply directly for an RCB if you wanted. Moreover, some candidates attended pre-RCB with more than one regiment or corps.
Very good comments and it is very interesting to read the threads. I also was a student at Welbeck College which provided technical officers for the Army (it did on those days). It was an interesting place but the key point was that over 90% of the students were from state schools. These went straight to Sandhurst and became officers in the the various technical corps. I did find myself in the minority there. It did have a 3 day selection process so the quality of students were v good.
I do not agree that the quality of officers in the Services is dictated by the number of independent school students. I do agree that there are as good quality students from the state system that would be the match for any independent school student. However, it is the number of bright and capable pupils with confidence that the independent sector delivers that gives the impression of bias. As I said earlier it is the focus of the educational systems that provides the opportunities for young people to consider a career in the services, and in the state sector there is a lot of negative bias against the Services.
If you want an example of how the Services are remembered in the different types of schools. Here it is, at my first schools, the Two VCs awarded to ex students are proudly on display in the school chapel and everyone knows about the actions of these two ex pupils. At my other independent school, there is a chapel built as a memorial to the WWI students who gave their lives. At the back of which are the two books of the dead, which celebrates the lives of students who died in both WWI !and WWII. You go to most independent schools and you will something similar. In fact at Winchester College there is a Balaclava students. There is a long history with independent schools and it is in their makeup that there has been a relationship with the military. It is not something you see in the state system. Or of you do it is a rare thing, partly due to the age of the schools. Partly due to the nature of state school teachers, which has tended to be not really supportive of the military.
This may explains there appears to be a lot of officers from independent schools. I would also suggest that certain regiments will have an even bigger percentage of intake from these schools, but this can be partly explained by the family nature of certain regiments, which is also valid for soldiers.
Keep up the chat, love the site keep going!
wf
True – I’m over-simplifying. However, the trouble is that pre-RCB visits give the ideal opportunity to decide who you don’t want. Moreover, there is then the process at Sandhurst of regiments confirming they still want to take young officers (hence the regimental reps at the Academy on the lookout for performance or behaviour that confirms or undermines their original choice). As I recall the Royal Logistic Corps tends to end up with most of those unwanted at this stage. The bottom line is that the regimental system resembles the British social class, ranging from upper class (Household Div, cavalry), upper middle class (posher infantry regiments, RTR), other infantry, artillery, engineer regiments + certain corps (middle middle class), more technical corps and less prestigious supporting branches (lower middle class). While you will sometimes find officers of the ‘wrong’ social background in surprising places, I think you would find a survey of the combat arms would give a fairly good correlation between school and the social background of their officers. One for the Equal Opportunities brigade perhaps? The answer is of course for officers to join a broad branch, such as ‘Infantry’, and to then be posted into regiments at random and without the CO being able to reject them.
A couple of years ago, a Teacher Friend of mine, decided to emigrate with his family to New Zealand to work. Now, he works at, Wanguni High School. It is a state school. Scroll down the page and have a look at what sports the School provides –
http://www.wanganui-high.school.nz/curriculum/sports
I wish my school had provided me with that level of choice.
X
Without dragging this post off centre, I’m: -
1) Born in a prefab
2) Dyspraxic / Dyslexic
3) First person in my entire extended family to go to university
4) Son of secretary and storeman, union convener.
I’ll slap working class dick on the table for ‘length for length’ comparison with anyone:)
Fatman
There is a lot to recomend the approach, of an infantry corp, the regimental system, has a lot to answer for, particulalry, as no unit fights as a regiment anymore, it is in part a breeding ground for this kind of ‘my gangs better than your gang’ bollocks.
Hmm. Where to start.
@AG: It is simply wrong to think of the Army of 14-18 as either (a) Led entirely by Public Schoolboys (although that was pretty much the case at the outset) or (b) Prone to woeful performance for the duration of that war. Fact is, by 1918 (by which stage a significant proportion of Junior officers were men of moderate means, and modest origins)the Brit Army was highly proficient at the most complex arts of war in history, and was deprived of total victory only by virtue of the lack of political will to continue the fight for the few more weeks needed for the Germans to formally acknowledge they had been comprehensively whipped.
Think of this – the armies of France, Russia, Italy and even Germany (at the very end) broke or mutinied between 1916 and 1918. Brits never even came close. If you want to find Generals who thought in terms simply of throwing men into the meat-grinder, you need to look at Nivelle of France, or Falkenhayn of Germany. Whatever their other failings, Haig and hiis subordinates bust a gut to get better at the business of modern war.
However: post WW1, few Regiments in the (rapidly down-sized) Regular Army were keen on retaining the services of chaps from modest backgrounds (like Bill Slim) who could not afford the gentleman’s lifestyle. Slim (commissioned into the same Regiment as Monty) opted to go to the Indian Army, and soldiered thereafter as a Gurkha officer).
In effect, despite best efforts of the likes of Percy Hobart, the mainstream regular Brit Army officer corps between the wars collectively managed to devalue most of the hard-earned tactical skill and understanding acquired in WW1; invented ‘new’ concepts for Tank operations that owed more to romance and to the tactical habits of Napoleonic and Crimean days than to professional rigour, and thus fielded an Army in 1940 that was (evidently) less capable than its largely-conscript 1918 predecessor.
This tendency to discard hard-learned lessons is one of the most worrying habits of the Regular Brit Army.
MOVING ON:
The educational demographics of the latter-day Brit Regular Army are not well understood by insiders (many, perhaps most, of whom refuse to acknowledge the possibility that there might even be an issue).
Outsiders have little or no chance of understanding how it works. It took me over 20 of my 30 years in khaki before I began to ‘get it’, the starting point being a little-known 1980s book called Power and Prestige in the British Army, by a former Brit officer with the unlikely-sounding name of Prof Reggie Von Zugbach De Sugg. He developed a rigorous methodology for categorising the educational origins of officers, and the social eliteness of regiments, and then systematically catalogued the regimental and educational backgrounds of all officers promoted to general’s rank between (from memory) the end of WW2, and about 1980.
Demonstrating, in the process, that certain ‘elite’ regiments predominated in the ranks of General, and that for the most part Generals came from ‘elite’ schools.
Lately, the picture has shifted somewhat. To understand it, you have to forget the idea that the Army is a single cohesive entity. In terms of officer careers, it is better to imagine a system built rather like the Ribblehead railway viaduct: (http://www.cambridge2000.com/gallery/images/P81515921.jpg). Each Regiment or Corps (‘capbadges’ for short) is one of a number of separate, nigh-on autonomous vertical structures, with ‘The Army’ as a linking span, unable to function without the verticals, running across the top, bearing the fast track to glory.
In order for an officer to get an opportunity to ride the Army’s fast track to Generalship, he/she must first rise to the to the top of the capbadge column: but, whereas the Army part of the mechanism seems to apply a rigorous set of standards that are entirely oblivious to the social/educational origins of candidates, it is evident that the socially-agnostic quality criteria applied once a candidate has been propelled to this higher-level of opportunity, are not common currency across all capbadges.
A number of fast-rising stars recently have been products of State schools – but they are mostly from Corps, not from Regiments (i.e. Royal Engineers rather than Infantry or Cavalry). Closer scrutiny of the Infantry strongly suggests that old habits die hard.
Since the 1970s, over 50% of Sandhurst graduates have come from state schools, but while this demographic has been reflected in the entry figures [bottom of the column] for most Infantry Regiments, at the top of the column, there is significant variation between Regiments when they select Commanding Officers for Regular Battalions – the critical command appointment, without which Generalship is unachievable.
in essence, the Army is happy to promote any ‘able’ candidate. Some capbadges are more (much more) likely than others to perceive ability in officers who are State school products.
I hope that all makes sense so far: what it doesn’t explain, is how we have wound up with Senior Officers and a General Staff so devoid of imagination and integrity. You can’t blame that on Public Schools, when the Army system is clearly perfectly content to promote ‘the most able’, regardless of background, as long as their parent capbadge is willing to groom them for the opportunity.
Something deeper is at work: our Army’s command culture has become deeply risk-averse, at least where risk to the promotion prospects of the individual is concerned. Obviously, the safest way up is to agree with your gaffer; new thinking is dangerous; inventive/innovative thinking is ‘risky’. If you want to be viewed as ‘able’, you must unlearn those habits.
It is ‘between the wars’, all over again.
O – and we live in an age where (across the public sector)corporate failure is not laid at the door of the individual (nominally) in charge, which in turn means we have a climate in which the only success which matters, is the career success of an individual. That means you can foul up in Defence procurement (or, indeed, in command of Brit operations in Basra) and still make it to Lt Gen.
We’re in a very bad place, and our Army’s commanders are showing no sign of smelling the Colombian Medium Roast . . . .
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Stonkernote: Apologies. My first post on Think Defence, and it is massive.
In my defence, it is a subject about which I feel quite strongly, have debated keenly over the years, and my hypothesis has the support of Prof Reggie.
Welcome Stonker – good stuff.
The pressure to conform is not limited to the Army, particularly when the P45′s are flying – there’s been a lot of discussion about looking after “disruptive thinkers” over at the USNI in the last few months. The gunnery expert William Sims is their poster-child, even if he did nick the idea of continuous-aim firing from Percy Scott, originally of HMS Scylla before one too many arguments with an admiral got him posted to Singapore on Terrible…
http://blog.usni.org/2012/04/09/guest-post-by-lcdr-benjamin-bj-armstrong-time-to-think-and-to-listen
http://blog.usni.org/2012/06/08/guest-post-a-junior-officer-and-a-discovery-by-lcdr-benjamin-bj-armstrong and following
Lots of good links to follow up in that lot as well.
Also worth noting that one of Bernard Gray’s pet peeves (formalised in the Levene review) is the lack of accountability that comes with people passing through programme offices for 18-24 months at a time. He’s trying to make them stick for 4-5 years in one place, and make people much more directly accountable for the success or otherwise of the procurements they manage. We’ll see how it turns out, but it seems to be going in the right direction.
Sir H talks about this kind of stuff a lot at http://thinpinstripedline.blogspot.co.uk/ with eg http://thinpinstripedline.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/generalist-not-specialist-thoughts-on.html – and his latest tome is how the RN is losing good people who just want to command ships rather than drive a desk, in an era when we have a lot more desks than ships….
PS x – I wasn’t having a go, just expanding on your throwaway line because I happened to have the stats at hand. Something else I learnt from rereading that book today – Eton’s CCF is the only one to have a battle honour, from the Boer War.
@CB perhaps worth noting that:
Present CDS, late RA, about 7% of total reg army strength (he is the third late RA CDS since the position was created some 50 yrs ago – of couse you could add Alan Brooke a few years earlier). Present CGS, late RE, about 7% of total reg army strength.
Point is don’t make sweeping statements about cav and guards, although as Stonker pointed out they are good career managers.
A bit of history, by about late 1941 the army had an officer crisis, the various OTUs (RMCS and RMAW had closed in 1939) were experiencing high failure rates, men with officer potential were not coming forward. The problem was officer candidate selection (interviews) which was seen as and probably was too ‘old school tie’ oriented. The Adjutant General (late RA and later the first head of UNESCO) created a new system and turned the situation around, it was seen as fair and was clearly effective because the OTU failure rate dropped dramatically. This system basically exists to this the day. The question, therefore is the profile of candidates attending and the profile of those that fail (RMAS gives us the profile of those that pass).
Basically the selection process looks for candidates with the attributes of potential leaders.
A final amusing touch, an article in the old A&DQ about 40 yrs ago by a former staff officer in WO AG branch in WW2, regarded the AG as a dangerous socialist for his innovations.