Posh girlies rejoice! Private school and Russell Group unis are actually better for your health

Um, so it turns out that people who go to private school or a Russell Group uni will have better health when they’re middle-aged. All the Surrey school, Exeter uni and Clapham grad pipeline girlies are quaking right now.

New research found that by age 46, people who studied at a Russell Group university performed better on memory tests like recalling worlds and naming animals, and tests measuring attention and visual abilities.

Whereas if mummy and daddy forked out for a private school, you are more likely to have lower blood pressure, be a healthy weight and perform better on cognitive tasks.

For example, attending private school was linked with a 14 per cent lower body mass index, while attending a Russell Group university was linked to a 16 per cent better memory and 10 per cent better naming ability.

People who went to private school had an average BMI of 26.9, compared with 28.6 for state or public school students, and a pulse rate of 66.3 beats per minute compared with 68.4 for non-private school students.

The link was still found even when researchers took household income into account, suggesting that going to private school actually makes more of a difference than family background. Going to Grammar school was also associated with better cardiovascular and cognitive health than a state school.

The study, led by UCL, studied 8,000 people born in the 1970s and now in middle age. The type of school each person had attended was categorised into private, grammar, comprehensive and other. Everyone who had a degree was asked at the age of 42 about the first university they had attended. Of the 8m000 studied 554 went to a Russell Group uni and 570 went to private school. It was published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health by the British Medical Journal.

The researchers said: “Our findings suggest that the type of education could potentially contribute to understanding links between education and health.

“If this association is causal, future policies aimed at reducing health inequalities could take education quality into account as well as attainment.”

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