Labour win would bring ‘most educated’ UK Cabinet in history

Labour is likely to have the most educated Cabinet in UK history, with nearly half of its ministers having gained at least one postgraduate degree, if it wins power next week.

If Sir Keir Starmer was to make no changes to his ministerial top team on reaching Downing Street, some 15 of 31 Cabinet members – 48 per cent – would hold a higher-level degree and all but two would have undergraduate degrees, according to analysis by Times Higher Education. Two of them – Anneliese Dodds, a former politics lecturer, and Peter Kyle – would also hold PhDs.

For the first time, all holders of the so-called great offices of state would have postgraduate qualifications; Sir Keir studied at the University of Oxford after his undergraduate degree at the University of Leeds; potential chancellor Rachel Reeves attended the London School of Economics (LSE) after Oxford; would-be foreign secretary David Lammy went to Harvard Law School after SOAS University of London; and likely home secretary Yvette Cooper has studied at Oxford, Harvard University and the LSE.

In contrast, just six of Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet hold postgraduate qualifications, of whom three hold postgraduate law diplomas.

Only education secretary Gillian Keegan, who took a diploma at London Business School after her first degree at Liverpool John Moores University, and security minister Tom Tugendhat, who has a master’s in Islamic studies from the University of Cambridge, hold non-law postgraduate qualifications.

According to a list compiled on X by academic Chris Brooke, there are 66 candidates standing in this year’s general election who hold a PhD – including academics in winnable seats such as Pam Cox (Labour, Colchester), Alasdair Pinkerton (Liberal Democrat, Surrey Heath) and Paul Kohler (Liberal Democrat, Wimbledon).

An influx of PhDs or postgraduates into parliament or the Cabinet might not necessarily translate into an army of higher education advocates, warned Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute.

“There have been many ex-academics in parliament and in government, and often the last thing that they want to talk about is universities,” observed Mr Hillman.

If Labour is elected on 4 July, the likely Cabinet would once again have a strong Oxbridge contingent, with 14 ministers, or 45 per cent, having attended one of the UK’s two oldest universities.

That is similar to the 53 per cent of Mr Sunak’s Cabinet who were Oxbridge-educated, although their educational journeys are very different. While 63 per cent of that Cabinet, according to a Sutton Trust report in November 2023, were educated privately – 41 per cent went from a private school to Oxbridge – just 17 per cent of Labour’s shadow Cabinet was privately educated.

“If Labour wins, the incoming Cabinet will have a very different social composition,” observed sociologists Sam Friedman and Aaron Reeves, both from the LSE, whose book Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite (due to be published in September) examines, among other things, how Oxbridge perpetuates class inequalities.

“Around 7 per cent of the current Conservative Cabinet come from working-class backgrounds, in terms of their parents’ jobs. But this rises to 46 per cent among the current shadow Cabinet,” said the two academics.

Noting that “69 per cent of the current Cabinet were at some point privately educated”, a new class make-up in Labour’s Cabinet will “matter because our research shows that elites from privileged class backgrounds or who have attended an elite private school tend to the tilt to the right politically and socially.

“They are less likely than other elites to think we should increase taxes on the rich, less likely to prioritise reducing poverty, and less likely to think Britain is a racist country,” they said.

“An incoming government, then, will likely have a very different set of ideological orientations, [but] whether attitudes translate into action, however, is less clear.”

jack.grove@timeshighereducation.com