Private school entry to Oxbridge: how cultural capital counts in the making of elites

Abstract

In this article we make an argument for the importance of embodied cultural capital in the generation of class advantage through private school students’ access to Oxbridge. Private schools in England continue to reproduce advantage (Variyan 2019), however, establishing exactly how students are advantaged through private schooling is not straightforward. Previous studies of educational advantage have drawn on the broad concept of cultural capital (e.g. Bathmaker, Ingram and Waller 2013; Reay, David and Ball 2005) to elucidate processes of inequality. We contend that within this space of Bourdieusian analysis of middle-class advantage there is a need for further thinking about embodied cultural capital as a specific and powerful form working at the symbolic level. By examining a bespoke intervention in a private school in England, we shed new light on how students are advantaged when applying to elite universities through processes that facilitate the cultivation of embodied cultural capital.