🎓 Sir Peter Lampl has given away £50 million of his self-made fortune to help boost social mobility in Britain
telegraph.co.uk/family/life/ob…
🎓In 1997 Lampl founded the Sutton Trust.
Thanks to him, state-school places at Oxbridge have risen in the past 20 years from 48% to somewhere approaching 70%.
Only 7% of the population goes to private schools
📚 If you factor in the many hours of pro bono work, what he has done is “extreme” philanthropy.
His mottos include:
📌 “Charity just writes the cheque"
📌 "Education is the building blocks of everything"
👑 Philanthropy has brought recognition in the shape of a knighthood and influence.
In 2011, the coalition government appointed him as chairman of the Education Endowment Foundation, a think-tank which was given £125 million to assess what makes good schools work
🇦🇹 Lampl is the son of an Austrian refugee who arrived in the UK without a word of English and fought the Germans in the Second World War.
📍 He grew up on a council estate in Yorkshire until the age of 11.
📈 His social mobility was the result of a grammar-school education
It was there he learnt what a difference a good teacher makes.
❌His physics teacher was fond of saying “the only way you’ll get to Oxford is on a bus.”
✅ His chemistry teacher took him under his wing and helped him gain a place at Corpus Christi, Oxford, to study chemistry
⁉️ Why are we as a nation obsessed with Oxbridge?
“When you look at the top 5,000 people in this country, 40% went to private schools and 25% went to Oxbridge. That’s massive...It’s ridiculous. It’s unfair. It’s also uneconomic, because we’re missing out on lots of talent”
🇺🇸 Lampl’s fortune was made working as a management consultant in Boston and New York.
👷 He later set up his own private-equity firm that invested in building materials distribution.
💼 He exceeded expectations and circumstances to make enough money to retire in his late 40s
🎵 Business and The Beatles 🎵
"Everyone’s trying to do the sexy thing. The bitcoin. The only vaguely interesting business I did was reselling Beatles tickets when I was 16. Everything after that was really dull"
🎒 Lampl's social mobility drive started with summer schools.
💰 So far the Sutton Trust’s various programmes have helped 50,000 children with an average spend of £1,500 per child.
🇺🇸 The daughter of a single mum from Blackpool earned a £300,000 scholarship to Harvard
🚫 The current UK system is made up of boarding, private day schools, grammar schools and faith schools.
“The top 20% of schools in this country are out of reach for the average kid...It’s a mess. If you could do it, you would bulldoze the whole thing and start again”
⚖️ UK v USA ⚖️
Lampl hazards that if we had the same level of philanthropy in the UK as America, we would have £50 billion more to spend on good causes.
"My adventures in making big money and giving it away..."
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