Brenda Hale only went into the law because her headteacher told her she wasn’t clever enough to read history. So it’s no surprise she felt a little overawed on coming up to Cambridge in the 1960s and finding it full of blithely confident young men behaving as if a place at the university was merely their due. Or as she recently put it, “I encountered many young men from public school backgrounds who felt entitled to good jobs. And I realised that actually, quite a few of them were no better than me and, in some cases, not as good as me. The five building blocks for confidence Hinds identified, ranging from sport to work experience, are sensible enough; but plenty of state schools already do all that and still struggle to make pupils believe in themselves.

Source: The Guardian December 20, 2019 06:00 UTC