Sir Peter Lampl

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2018

⏱️ 39 minutes

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Summary

Sir Peter Lampl is a philanthropist who has given over £50 million and worked for 20 years to combat educational inequality. In 1997 he founded the Sutton Trust with the aim of improving social mobility. The Trust has funded over 200 research studies, and it initiates and supports a wide range of programmes, covering everything from early years education to access to the professions. The son of a Viennese émigré, Peter Lampl grew up in modest circumstances in Yorkshire until the age of 11, when his family relocated to Surrey. He attended grammar schools, Oxford University and the London Business School. He worked as a management consultant and businessman in the USA and Europe, and in 1983 he set up the Sutton Company, an international private equity firm. His first move into philanthropy came in the wake of the Dunblane school shootings in 1996, when he funded the campaign which led to a complete ban on the private ownership of handguns in the UK. His interest in social mobility was sparked by his realisation that in recent years "a kid like me had little chance of making it to Oxbridge", noting that his school was now "all fee-paying" and his Oxford college "used to have lots of ordinary Welsh kids, but they're not coming through any more." He received an OBE in 2000 for services to Access to Higher Education, and was knighted in June 2003. Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the BBC.
0:03.0	Hello, I'm Kristi Young.
0:05.0	Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item
0:12.0	that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.
0:16.0	For rights reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast.
0:22.0	You can find over 2,000 more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Discs website.
0:31.0	Music
0:48.0	My castaway today is the entrepreneur and philanthropist, Sir Peter Lample.
0:53.0	His beginnings were modest, his achievements are not.
0:57.0	He made a fortune in commerce, but instead of buying a super yacht, he plumped instead for trying to do his bit to make Britain a fairer place to grow up.
1:05.0	As founder of the Sutton Trust, he spent 20 years and around about £50m of his own money trying to improve educational outcomes and social mobility.
1:16.0	He first got a taste for giving after the Dumbling school shootings.
1:21.0	It was his money that funded the campaign that successfully saw the introduction of a total ban on handgun ownership.
1:28.0	Witnessing the power of that wealth-enhanced crusade, convinced him to devote the remainder of his time and wealth to giving disadvantaged youngsters at the bottom of the pile a hand up.
1:37.0	He says, I am into excellence, but I think we need to focus more on fairness and opportunity.
1:44.0	We have got such a long way to go to make it fair.
1:48.0	Sir Peter Lample, fairness and opportunity sound pretty simple, doesn't it? Why is it proving so difficult?
1:54.0	It's like pushing water uphill.
1:57.0	Social mobility, we are talking about people from low-modeling backgrounds moving up the ladder in a relative sense.
2:07.0	If you are doing that, you are actually displacing people who are already on that ladder.
2:13.0	There is a lot of resistance to social mobility because of that.
2:17.0	It's the case, I believe, that if you were somebody born in the late 50s, you were more likely to have made your way up the class structure than somebody who was born in 1970.
	...

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