Leicester Vice-Chancellor responds to Sutton Trust’s Elitist Britain report

A report published this week explored the educational backgrounds of leading figures across the world of politics, media, business, charity, sport, creative and public sectors.

The Sutton Trust’s Elitist Britain report reveals that university vice-chancellors are much more representative of the general population than other public servants.

The report shows that:

• Only 15% of vice-chancellors were privately educated, making it one of the professions with the lowest private school attendance in this report.
  

• Half attended comprehensive school (50%), representing a significant increase of 17 percentage points over the last five years, and 29 percentage points in the last decade.
  

• Unsurprisingly, all vice-chancellors hold university degrees, with 16% attending either Oxford or Cambridge, and 44% having attended a Russell Group university (a decrease of 7 percentage points since 2019).
  

Here, the University of Leicester President and Vice-Chancellor, Professor Nishan Canagarajah, examines the findings of the report:

"The findings of the Elitist Britain report from the Sutton Trust highlight an enduring and deeply entrenched imbalance in who occupies positions of influence in the UK. While it is encouraging to see that university vice-chancellors are among the most representative groups in terms of socio-economic background, this should not be a point of complacency but a call to action for all sectors.

At Leicester, we are proud to be a university in the UK’s first plural city, where no single ethnic group is in the majority, and we strive to reflect and champion that diversity at every level. Our student body comes from a vast range of backgrounds, and many, like me, are the first in their families to enter higher education. We are proud that Leicester is a place where talent and potential, not privilege, define success.

But the challenge of representation begins much earlier than leadership appointments. If we are to build a truly equitable society, we must focus on access at every stage: in schools, in university admissions, and in the pipelines that lead to leadership roles across all sectors. Socio-economic background must be recognised alongside other dimensions of diversity, and barriers, both visible and invisible, must be dismantled.

We support the Sutton Trust’s call for greater transparency in socio-economic data reporting, and we encourage employers to think more broadly about what merit and potential look like. This is not just about fairness it is about making better decisions, drawing on wider talent, and building a more inclusive, dynamic, and representative society.

At Leicester, we remain committed to our founding ethos as a university ‘for the public good’ and to ensuring that higher education remains a ladder of opportunity for all. As someone who came to the UK on a scholarship from Sri Lanka to pursue higher education, I was privileged to experience the transformative power of opportunity."