Christ’s Hospital shouldn’t lecture pupils on white privilege

Students and teachers at Christ’s Hospital, a £36,600-a-year boarding school in Horsham, West Sussex, are set to be given ‘diversity training’. The plans, announced in June 2020, mean lessons will be given on ‘micro-aggressions and stereotyping’. Christ’s Hospital is far from the only public school to march headlong down this route; they are following a path previously trodden by the United States’s private schools. But this doesn’t mean they aren’t making a big mistake. 

The narrative of those who welcome Christ’s Hospital adopting the post Black Lives Matter fad for universal inclusivity training is that it is precisely the privileged pupils of Britain’s leading public schools who are desperately in need of discovering why they need to check their privilege. Yet this misses the truth about a school like Christ’s Hospital.

The school is perhaps best known for two things: its uniform of breeches, yellow knee socks, barrister-type white shirt with bands and cassock-style blue coat (provided free to all pupils), would not have looked out of place in the eighteenth century, but certainly makes its pupils stand out today.