When children are removed from their parents and taken into the care system to be raised

by people who don't love them, we all agree that's a pretty bad outcome. It might have

been sadly necessary, but no one would think that putting a kid in a group home is plan

A. But if a boy is separated from his family for most of the year, raised in an institution

notorious for horrendous acts of child abuse and bullying, but it goes by the name of

Ethan or Winchester and costs £45,000 a year. Well, who wouldn't want the very best for

their children? British public schools, which weirdly is the name we give to our most expensive

and prestigious private schools, are pretty unique in the Western world for the stranglehold

they have over the uppermost echelons of our society. The 7% of pupils who are privately

educated can expect to make up around 70% of senior judges, over half of top journalists

and to date about 85% of our Prime Ministers. What kind of governance do we get from this

tribe of men, separated from their mothers as children, and taught from the first day

of prep that they were born to rule? With me to answer this question is Richard Beard,

former pupil of Pinewood School and Radley College, and the author of Sadlittle Men, how

public schools failed Britain. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Well, thank you for inviting me. Could you just talk me through your personal history

of boarding schools, so where and when and how old? My personal history of boarding schools

didn't really have any relevance to anybody until I realised that I started at boarding

school in the same year as David Cameron and Boris Johnson, not in the same schools, but

in the same year. So therefore I would have seen much of what they saw and in my memory

the kind of things I saw become increasingly outrageous with time really. And then I thought

well that's quite interesting because these people are now in charge of us, well they

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