Cricket Australia

An Ashes series limited to privately educated players would not look as different as Australians might like to think.

So much for the Australian ‘private-school barrier’: Australian private schools are now comfortably producing a disproportionate share of international players. In both countries private schools are major nurseries of Ashes cricketers. The percentage of privately educated children has been consistently higher than in England, where it has fluctuated fairly narrowly around the 7.5% level. Accordingly, the share of privately educated students has risen significantly in the past 50 years – from around 25% to the current 35%. For children educated in the UK, the probability of playing in an Ashes Test for England was about six times larger if you went to private school. The England team of 2005, who so memorably regained the Ashes, were largely a product of the comprehensive system, with a little help from overseas. By the 1980s – the era of Ian Botham and David Gower – most members of the team who had been educated in Britain were from state schools, generally comprehensive. The majority of schools are state funded and non-selective. This all changed in the 1960s with the end of selective schooling in the state sector. The over-representation of private schools is striking – on average in the post-war era they have accounted for only about 7–8% of secondary school-age children. Elite school cricket was and still is a major part of the Establishment. We identified the schools that 228 out of 255 (89%) England Ashes players attended in the post-war period.