Head of £12,700-a-term school says private pupils being discriminated against like Jews in Nazi Germany

A headteacher has compared criticism of private schools to Adolf Hitler’s demonisation of Jews.

Anthony Wallersteiner, who leads the £38,000-a-year Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, claimed attacks on fee-paying education “echo the conspiratorial language” of antisemitic texts disseminated in Nazi Germany.

His comments came in an interview with The Times in which he suggested private-school pupils were being edged out of Oxford and Cambridge universities by “social engineering”.

Dr Wallersteiner, who is of Jewish descent, said: “The rise of populists and polemicists has created a micro-industry in bashing private schools.

“Some of the criticisms echo the conspiratorial language of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was relatively easy for Hitler and his henchmen to suggest that the Jewish minority was over-represented in key professions: medicine, law, teaching and the creative industries.

“Privately educated pupils in the UK are also being accused of dominating the top jobs and stifling social mobility … It is all too facile to stereotype groups and ignore the fact that lawyers, doctors, writers and politicians are individuals.”

Reacting to the headteacher’s comments, a spokesperson for the Campaign Against Antisemitism said: “Tasteless Holocaust analogies do not belong in the debate about education in this country.

“Nazi propaganda against Jews was used to generate public support not only for exclusion from education but also for brutal beatings, boycotts, degradation and eventually the mass murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children.”

A spokesperson for Stowe School told The Independent that Dr Wallersteiner’s remarks had been “taken out of context”. The comments were made during a discussion of a proposed article for The Times in which he defended private education and took aim at “the enemies of independent schools”.

The headteacher told the newspaper many fee-paying parents were concerned that efforts to widen access to top universities had “successfully driven down the number of Oxbridge places awarded to privately educated pupils”.

“There’s a much more concerted effort by admissions tutors to drive down the number of places given to independent schools and redress the balance and to put in contextual details,” he said.

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Of school leavers awarded a place at Cambridge in 2017, 64.1 per cent were from state schools – up from to 61.4 per cent in 2013. At Oxford, the figure rose from 56.8 per cent to 58.2 per cent.

The Labour MP David Lammy said: “Can someone please fetch Dr Wallersteiner the world’s tiniest violin? Seven per cent of all UK pupils attend private schools – but they get 42 per cent of Oxbridge places. There is social engineering going on here, but it’s not benefiting state school kids.”

Analysis published by social mobility charity the Sutton Trust in December showed eight private schools had sent 1,310 pupils to Oxbridge over three years, while over the same period just 1,220 students from 2,894 other schools were allocated places.

Oxford was last year named Britain’s least socially inclusive university, with more than 60 per cent of its students drawn from private or grammar schools.

Private school graduates also dominate the UK’s elite professions, with more than 70 per cent of top judges, more than half of leading journalists, and almost three-quarters of military officers drawn from fee-paying institutions that account for only 7 per cent of pupils across the country.

An Oxford University spokesperson told The Independent: “Everyone at Oxford is selected based on academic ability and potential alone, by following the same rigorous admission process for the course they applied for.

“We are committed to our role in broadening participation in higher education and building an inclusive vibrant Oxford. To achieve this we are reaching out to and selecting the best students from across the school spectrum and different communities across the country.”

Cambridge University said it was “committed to playing its part in facilitating social mobility and making sure that our contextualised admissions processes recognise the academic ability and potential of all our applicants”.

A spokesperson added: “The sense of growing competition from a nearly four-fold increase in applications over the last four decades make us more determined to celebrate the success of every student who achieves a place at Cambridge.”