Privately educated twice as likely to consistently vote Conservative

Those educated at private schools are twice as likely to be consistent Conservative voters in adulthood as those who had a state education, according to a new study involving UCL researchers. Published in the journal Sociology , the study uses data from a longitudinal study of almost 7,000 British people born in 1970. It is the first of its kind to follow a group of people over decades to quantify how private or state education affected their voting behaviour and their political attitudes by midlife. Overall, the study found that, by age 42, those with a private school education were twice as likely be consistent Conservative voters - defined as voting for the party in three or four out of four consecutive General Elections (1997, 2001, 2004 and 2010). This was found to be the case even after controlling for variables including socio-economic background and academic achievement. They were also found to be one and half times more likely to hold right-wing opinions bv age 42 as those who were state educated, as measured in 2012 by asking them how much they disagreed with statements that 'government should redistribute income', that 'big business benefits the owners at the expense of the workers' and 'there's one law for the rich and one for the poor'. However, the effect was different across gender, with privately educated men more likely to vote Conservative than privately educated women.