On this morning’s BBC Radio 4 Today programme, Lord Norton of Louth, a Conservative member of the House of Lords, noted that one of his former students, Kevin Shinkwin, had been included in the 2015 Dissolution Peerages list published yesterday.
It triggered HEPI to undertake a quick analysis of the higher education of all 45 new peers. Although there are a few blanks (most of the information was taken from Wikipedia), three things stand out:
- The dominance of Oxford (not Oxbridge as there are 11 new peers from Oxford and only one from Cambridge and not the Oxford-Cambridge-London golden triangle as there is only one apiece from the LSE, UCL and Queen Mary)
- The fact that the overwhelming majority did go to university (given the average age of those accepting peerages is relatively high, they would have typically been educated when only a small proportion of the population went to university)
- Arguably, the relatively strong performance of Scottish institutions (as Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow all feature)
Originally, we planned to include a third column showing the current mission group status of each university but there didn’t seem much point, given the results…
| New peer | Higher education (usually undergraduate) |
| James Arbuthnot | Cambridge |
| Rt Hon Gregory Barker | Royal Holloway |
| Catherine Fall | Oxford |
| Simone Finn | Oxford |
| Stephen Gilbert | Not known |
| Rt Hon William Hague | Oxford |
| Robert Hayward OBE | Rhodesia |
| Rt Hon Douglas Hogg QC | Oxford |
| Rt Hon Andrew Lansley CBE | Exeter |
| James Lupton CBE | Oxford |
| Ruby McGregor-Smith CBE | Kingston Polytechnic (now Kingston University) |
| Anne McIntosh | Edinburgh |
| Michelle Mone OBE | Not applicable |
| James O’Shaughnessy | Oxford |
| Emma Pidding CBE | Not known |
| Stuart Polak CBE | Not known |
| Councillor Gary Porter | Not known |
| Councillor Elizabeth Redfern | Not known |
| Rt Hon Andrew Robathan | Oxford |
| Kate Rock | Not known |
| Councillor Jane Scott OBE | Lancashire College of Agriculture (now Myerscough College) |
| Kevin Shinkwin | Hull |
| Philip Smith CBE | Not known |
| Philippa Stroud | Birmingham |
| Rt Hon David Willetts | Oxford |
| Rt Hon Sir George Young Bt CH | Oxford |
| Sir Alan Beith | Oxford |
| Sharon Bowles | Reading |
| Sir Malcolm Bruce | Queen’s College (now Dundee) |
| Lorely Burt | Swansea |
| Rt Hon Sir Menzies ‘Ming’ Campbell CH, CBE, QC | Glasgow |
| Lynne Featherstone | Oxford Polytechnic (now Oxford Brookes) |
| Don Foster | Keele |
| Jonny Oates | Exeter |
| Shas Sheehan | UCL |
| Sir Andrew Stunell | Manchester |
| Dorothy Thornhill MBE | Not known |
| Rt Hon David Blunkett | Sheffield |
| Rt Hon Alistair Darling | Aberdeen |
| Rt Hon Peter Hain | Queen Mary College (now Queen Mary University of London) |
| Rt Hon Tessa Jowell DBE | Aberdeen |
| Spencer Livermore | LSE |
| Paul Murphy | Oxford |
| Rt Hon Dawn Primarolo DBE | Bristol Polytechnic (now the University of the West of England) |
| Dave Watts | Not known |