How England’s top private schools came to own 38,000 acres of land

At a certain point, walking south along the River Itchen, the playing fields of Winchester college begin to appear, green and well cared for on the other side. Nestled among the rugby football and cricket pitches is an outdoor classroom that holds 30. Nearby is the rowing club, and New Hall, the theatre that seats 400.

Beyond them lie the ancient school buildings, the cloisters and the boarding houses. The students who have attended this institution – including, several decades ago, the prime minister, Rishi Sunak – have access to more than 250 acres of glorious open space, a fact that the college proclaims proudly on its website. It is, as they would agree, a pretty luxurious setup.

The Guardian has been investigating the amount of green and open space available to students at the top private schools in England, in comparison with that enjoyed by a typical state school student. Using satellite tools and publicly available information, we mapped how much land each school owned, and then calculated how much of that was open space available to the students.

Eton came top of the list, in terms of the acreage available to pupils. But although Winchester’s students have a smaller area available to them, the college’s entire holdings are extremely substantial at 8,167 acres of land according to the Guardian’s geospatial analysis.

A number of other schools are also substantial land owners. Eton holds 2,300 acres in total, Lord Wandsworth and Stonyhurst own more than 1,000, while Stowe school, Radley college and Royal Hospital school all own or have held in trust more than 750 acres.

In fact, between them, the top 250 schools own a stunning 38,086 acres of land, or about 59 miles². It is a startling contrast with the state school system, where the average student has, according to the Guardian’s calculations, access to just a tenth of the open space.

Just 245,000 of England’s 9m or so school pupils attend these private schools, but it is well established that they will enjoy enormous subsequent advantages over the rest. According to the Sutton Trust in 2019, 65% of judges, 44% of politicians and 59% of civil service permanent secretaries attended private school.

So how did these schools come by all this land? Ironically, in many cases, the founders wanted to create educational opportunities for poor children, or bring them into the church.

England’s earliest schools, some of which date back more than 1,000 years, were founded by kings or churches, and were not initially endowed with large amounts of land and wealth. In 1382 however, William of Wykeham founded Winchester College, and, as Robert Verkaik, the author of Posh Boys, has noted, “education was suddenly the new charity of choice for independently minded movers and shakers of the medieval period”.

Wykeham, the son of a farmer, rose to become Edward III’s chief builder – he was responsible for Windsor Castle – and then Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor. He used some of the spectacular wealth he acquired to support poor students, to set up New College, Oxford and then to found Winchester college, which he endowed with a large amount of land, including Downton Rectory Manor in Wiltshire, and Eling Manor in Hampshire. Over the next 150 years, the school, by purchase or gift, amassed land across Wiltshire, Middlesex, the Isle of Wight, Hampshire and Herefordshire; in the 1540s, acres of ex-monastery land were bestowed on the college by Henry VIII to swap for the land in Middlesex where he wanted to enlarge his estate around Hampton Court Palace.

After Wykeham, funding education was seen as a good charitable aim, but also by some as a way of displaying power, much like building a church or palace. Though royalty and the church were still founding schools (a few years after Wykeham’s move, when King Henry VI created Eton college, he confiscated land from various aristocrats to create its grounds) other schools were increasingly established by self-made men who wanted to give their home towns a leg up, or via the guilds as benefits for their members.

The original funding for Bedford school in Bedford, for example, came from William Harpur, a local man who started off as a tailor, became Lord Mayor of London in 1561 and was knighted by Elizabeth I. The farmland that Harpur donated to the school (13 acres of land in what is now Holborn in London) provided a generous income for what has become a leading boarding and day school with a £6m theatre, a £3m music school and a recent £1.8m upgrade for the library.

Robert Aske, a century or so later, was a Yorkshireman who rose through the Haberdashers Company to become master haberdasher in 1685: part of his bequest to the company was financial backing for a school to educate 20 poor freemen of the company, now Haberdashers’ Boys’ school based in 100 acres in Hertfordshire, with annual fees of £19-24,000.

Another wave of schools were founded by dissenting religious groups like the Methodists, who run two parallel networks, one of academies, and one of fee-paying schools such as Culford, where pupils can enjoy 480 acres of Suffolk countryside – 409 of it within 5km of the college as per the Guardian methodology – for an annual boarding fee of about £40,000.

Women were getting in on the act too. In 1872, the Girl’s Day School Trust was founded by four women; Maria Grey and her sister Emily Shirreff, both passionate advocates for education for women, with Lady Stanley of Alderley and Mary Gurney. As Victorian women they were not rich in their own right (the Married Women’s Property Act would not come into force for another 10 years) and so they launched the Girls’ Public Day School Company, selling shares to raise the funds to open girls’ schools.

David Kynaston, historian and co-author of Engines of Privilege; Britain’s Private School Problem, told the Guardian: “The difference between the founding purpose of the schools and their current function is very glaring. These schools were set up for the charitable purpose to educate society more broadly, but they have become, essentially, an efficient service industry for the better off to enhance and embed their privilege.” Kynaston himself attended Wellington College, and took his son (who went to a state school) many years later: “He was staggered at the sheer extent of the grounds, which I had taken largely for granted.”

The differences, he said, play out in all sorts of way, such as dominating certain field of sport like cricket, where state schools just do not have the facilities. “It means a broader, easier path for those children, while the path for the child coming from a state school is narrower and more difficult.”

“There are all sorts of inequality in the world,” said Kynaston. “But for me the inequality of children is among the worst. These years are so life moulding, they determine so much. You want a fair chance for every child, not this grotesquely skewed system.”