The best way to fix our broken, elitist political system is to get more working class kids into university

DID you catch what Damian Hinds said about university admissions this week?

I suspect not, and that won’t just be because few people have really caught who Damian Hinds is.

The Education Secretary made some comments about higher education which were all but buried by the deluge of coverage of his own party tearing itself up over Europe.

While Conservative MPs were discussing whether they were now stuck with Theresa May for ever after the attempt to boot her out of office failed, Hinds was poring over statistics from universities admissions body UCAS, which showed that a record proportion of English and Scottish 18-year-olds were accepted into university in 2018.

The minister wasn’t very happy though, because his department’s own data shows that teenagers from white working-class backgrounds are the least likely to go to universities — and even less likely to end up in a top institution.

“There is no reason why a white working-class child growing up in Sunderland or Somerset should be less likely to go to university than any other child growing up in this country,” he said, telling universities that they need to “look at your own admissions policies and work out what you can do to ensure that your university is open to everyone who has the potential, no matter their background or where they are from”.

Universities can’t just expect students to come to them. They need to do far more when it comes to outreach, actually visiting isolated and deprived areas and talking to children years before they start thinking about university.

Otherwise, a child growing up in a community where very few people have a degree will believe university just isn’t for them.

The top universities all have their own outreach policies, and don’t work together to reach particularly under-represented parts of the country, which means entire towns can often end up being ignored.

The political world doesn’t help, either. A young, white, working-class boy might not think he fits into the current Parliament, and so a vicious cycle of the same sort of people from the same sort of backgrounds going into politics continues. We know all the figures about the percentage of MPs who went to private schools (29 per cent, compared to seven per cent of the general population), or that 19 prime ministers were schooled at Eton.

But what we are less likely to realise is that there are entire towns in this country that have never, ever had an MP who was born and schooled locally.

Or that the cost of getting into politics means that if you are from a working-class background, your only hope of becoming an MP is landing a well-paid job first. And that tends to be easier if you’ve been to university.

MPs tend to recruit their researchers straight from university. Researchers go on to become special advisers or take other political jobs before becoming MPs, so the political gene pool is artificially shallow from the beginning.

It’s handy to have MPs who hail from all kinds of backgrounds, but especially useful to have people who grew up in tough circumstances.

When governments make mistakes, it is usually the most vulnerable people who suffer first. A Parliament of old Etonians can’t always instinctively realise when a policy is going to cause trouble.

I don’t need to tell you that the current Parliament isn’t working very well.

From those at the top of government who have failed to take big decisions on Brexit, to the backbenchers who have been busy plotting away, a lot of people in Westminster seem to be lacking a sense of perspective.

This week the drama has all been about Brexit, but the infighting means that serious policy problems on social care, domestic abuse and, yes, education are largely ignored.

If we made it easier for any bright kid from any background to get to university, perhaps we would have more competition for Parliamentary seats — and end up with better politicians.

So if Damian Hinds got his way with universities, he’d be putting the future mediocre politicians out of a job.

There might even be entire weeks in politics when you’d have a chance of noticing comments made by the Education Secretary, rather than being distracted by the self-indulgent way in which politicians of all persuasions have ended up conducting themselves.

• Isabel Hardman is the author of Why We Get The Wrong Politicians, out now.