Private education is unfair, but is there anything we can do about it?

Engines of Privilege
By Francis Green and David Kynaston
Bloomsbury, 320pp, £20/$28

Gilded Youth
By James Brooke-Smith
Reaktion, 272pp, £18/$25

Both these books are essentially repeating Alan Bennett’s lines in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, delivered in 2014: “Private education is not fair. Those who provide it know it. Those who pay for it know it. Those who have to sacrifice in order to purchase it know it. And those who receive it know it.”

I’m one of those who received it – at Westminster School – and I know it: my education was unfair. As the impeccably researched Green-Kynaston book says, in a typical year over the last decade, more pupils from Westminster School have gone to Oxbridge than have pupils qualifying for free school meals from everywhere in Britain. That’s unfairness on stilts.