Are you #StateSchoolAndProud? Business leaders are telling their stories today
Lawyers, investors and board members from tens of companies have taken to social media to tell their stories, of navigating the business world from school.
It’s Social Mobility Day, and business leaders are sharing their stories of being educated in a state school on LinkedIn.
Lawyers, investors and board members from tens of companies have taken to social media to tell their stories, of navigating higher education and the business world after school.
The 93% Club said it produced 150 posts on LinkedIn using #StateSchoolProud with over 100,000 impressions so far.
The social media storm was conceived by the 93% Club, a movement founded in 2016 as a state-school social mobility organisation, aiming to support the university experience of students from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.
The ‘StateSchoolProud’ hashtag was launched in 2021, to highlight what the organisation called the ‘poverty of expectation’, with 93 per cent of people in state schools often having talents “largely untapped”.
The club also said the campaign was inspired through the cost of living crisis, with 10 per cent of primary school teachers spending their own money to buy food for students, 40 per cent of teachers reporting students coming to school without a coat and more than 60 per cent of secondary school teachers use their own money to buy items for pupils and schools. This is according to the National Foundation for Educational Research/
The trained lawyer who previous worked at Bates Wells and Herbert Smith Freehills, said: “I was the first person in my school’s history to achieve straight A*s at A-level, in a year where only 36 per cent of us passed our GCSEs.
“I still remember the feeling of holding that piece of paper in my hands, and thinking that these grades were my ticket out. I had been educated at a state comprehensive my entire life, and the story I had been told was that, in order to be truly happy and successful, I had to put as much distance between myself and my roots as possible.
“How wrong I was.”
Pender said the “truth” was there’s “very little that can prepare you for your first month at a Russell Group university”, after being educated in a state school.
“It’s a reality check like no other, good grades or not.”
She spoke about waking up at 6am to go to her part-time Saturday job and quickly becoming “deeply ashamed of the most ridiculous things” including her “accent, the shows you watch, the clothes you wear”, and even where to go on holiday.
The entrepreneur spoke about having “internalised my shame so much that I started to retreat into myself.”
“I stopped inviting my friends and family to visit, I would make up elaborate lies when anyone asked to stay at mine because I was mortified that I lived in a council house where parts of our floor were held together by duct tape. I was humiliated to be state educated. I hated myself for it all.”
She said she found the 93% Club, to “make sure that others never felt the level of isolation that I did.”
Speaking about social mobility, she said she was “proud of the school that raised me when I needed it”, and which “gave me the flexibility to work part time while studying”.
Others joined the rallying call, with Taylor Wessing partner Paul Leamy telling “all those in my network who have recently got the break they richly deserve – be proud of your background and journey, bring your whole self to the profession and use your platform to drive further positive disruption and change and to pay it forward”.
Founding member of the club, Joanna Hughes, told her followers it was “no longer a campaign, it’s a mission.”
She said “state school pupils do NOT need pity, they just need the barriers that they didn’t create removed, so they can have their potential unlocked.”
This comes amid a furore over Labour’s plans to tax private schools. Research from the Taxpayers’ Alliance suggested that the Treasury might actually lose money from forcing private schools to pay VAT as it will force more pupils into the state sector.
The plans are a bid to even out the education system, and raise more tax, if Keir Starmer were to get into power.
