Credit: This story was first seen on The Telegraph
England’s football team under-performs because too many players have been privately-educated, a Labour MP has claimed.
Stella Creasy, the MP for Walthamstow, said the national team could be missing out on talent in the state school system, The Telegraph reports.
She made the comments after a Conservative MP compared children being scouted as elite footballers to those being selected for grammar schools at a very young age.
He defended selection on the basis that it offers life changing opportunities for young footballers and musicians to make the most of their talents.
Ms Creasy responded by claiming that the England team’s poor performance was a result of 13% of its players attended a private school.
The figure comes from a 2014 report on social mobility by Alan Milburn, the former Labour health secretary.
Mr Milburn concluded that 13% of the England national team went to independent schools, which is “double the proportion of UK pupils attending these schools”. By contrast, 83% attended comprehensives.
Speaking during a debate on social mobility, Ms Creasy said: “13% of our national football team went to a private school, which is double the number of people who go to those private schools nationally.
In comments directed at Mr Redwood, she said: “Does he think that might account for the performance of our national football team, if we’re missing out on the talent that exists in the comprehensive sector? And will he recognise that that is precisely the problem that we’re looking at today? We’re missing out on talent as a result of too narrow a focus.”
Mr Redwood described her remarks as “obtuse”, adding: “I don’t think we are going to get a better team by training them less, and no longer giving them any kind of elite education.”
Earlier in the debate, Mr Redwood said many opposed selective grammar schools because they did not like the advantage it gave to those selected.
He added: “When I asked the shadow secretary of state whether she was upset by the fact that our elite sports people have usually been selected at quite a young age for special training, special education, and that they are expected to achieve to a much higher level than the average and they are given training and made to do extra work in order to do so, and she didn’t seem at all upset by that in any way.”
Former shadow home secretary Andy Burnham called this “a particularly useless analogy”, adding: “Education is about life, the skills that people need to get through life, the basic literacy, the numeracy. Sport is not about the entirety of life. That is why education is different, and that is why it is wrong to label any child as second class at age 11.”
Of the current England squad, only two players were privately educated. Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain attended St John’s College in Portsmouth and Theo Walcott was a pupil at The Downs School in Berkshire.