Liz Truss claimed today she was the first prime minister to have “gone to a comprehensive school”.
But this is incorrect, according to the government’s own website, which states Theresa May attended a comprehensive school.
Previous prime ministers also attended non-selected state schools before the “comprehensive” label was used.
May attended Holton Park Girls’ Grammar School in Oxfordshire, but the school became a comprehensive school in 1971 while she was a pupil there.
Even the government’s own biography of May states she was educated at “both grammar school and comprehensive school”.
All other prime ministers who have served in the post-war period were either educated at private schools or selective state schools, though many grammar schools attended by ex-PMs have since become comprehensive.
But as has been pointed out on social media, further back in history prime ministers Ramsay MacDonald and David Lloyd George attended non-selective state schools, though these were not known as comprehensives at the time.
The use of the word “comprehensive” to describe education has been around since the middle of last century. According to LSE research, the first comprehensive school opened in London in 1954, and the model was scaled up in 1965 by the Labour government of the time.
So while it is still noteworthy that only two prime ministers in post-war history have attended comprehensive schools, compared to five who went to Eton, it is not quite correct for Truss to claim she was the first one to do so.
Truss also presides over a cabinet dominated by private school alumni. According to Sutton Trust research, 68 per cent of the cabinet were privately-educated.
This is more than double that of Theresa May’s first cabinet (30 per cent), and more than David Cameron’s 2015 cabinet (50 per cent).
For an education-oriented website, you seem woefully lacking in grammatical knowledge. The construction ‘privately-educated’ used predicatively, as here, is both clumsy and irregular; ‘educated privately’ is much clearer. This construction draws by analogy on noun phrases such as ‘a privately-educated cabinet’, which, though orthographically common, are by and large solecistic, the hyphen being totally redundant. Any simple style guide will tell you that adverbs such as ‘privately’ do not require a hyphen before a verbal adjective; only adjectives ending in ‘ly’ (e.g. friendly) and adverbs that lack this suffix (e.g. well) do.