Picador wins 13-way auction for What School Did You Go To? by The 93% Club founder Sophie Pender
Picador has won a 13-way auction for What School Did You Go To?, an “agenda-setting dissection of our flawed education system” and the debut book by The 93% Club founder Sophie Pender.
Publishing director Andrea Henry bought UK and Commonwealth, excluding Canada, rights, including audio, from Jane Finigan at Lutyens and Rubinstein, for publication as a superlead hardback in 2028 to be backed by a “major” national campaign.
Pender grew up on a council estate in north London and studied for exams while on her McDonald’s shift. She would get to her local state school at six in the morning to revise before evening shifts in retail, and her prom dress was funded by payday loans. She and her mother survived domestic violence, and her father was lost to substance abuse when she was 12. She nevertheless achieved academically and attended Bristol University, before going on to take a job at a prestigious law firm.
On arriving at university, the publisher’s description goes on: “She’d made it, she thought. But soon learned that it wasn’t enough. As soon as she stepped foot on campus, she was met with the question: What school did you go to? It was here, at university, that the chasm between a private and state education came into sharp focus, the imbalances and injustices drawn along class lines posing stumbling blocks to true social mobility. In response, aged 19, she founded The 93% Club – a network for state-educated people: that is, the 93% of the population who are not privately educated and don’t have the same access to all-important connections.”
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In What School Did You Go To? Pender shares her “powerful personal experience and examines how the inequality of private vs state education plays out in all areas of life, negatively impacting everyone, and contributing to an increasingly divided society”. The publisher describes the book as an “agenda-setting dissection of our flawed education system [that] shows us how polarisation in the UK begins when, at age four, we segregate our children into two distinct groups”.
“Blending powerful storytelling with eye-opening statistics, clear-headed but impassioned, it lays out the common justifications for private schools and busts the myth that inequality is lessening. Addressing the changes that need to be made, it is a deeply personal and highly political manifesto that will make some people feel uncomfortable. But that, Pender argues, is a price worth paying to make this country better.”
Henry said: “It’s rare that a proposal comes along that grabs the entire team as this one has. I have been moved and honoured to hear my state-educated colleagues’ own stories of bending themselves into impossible shapes to fit privately educated people’s expectations of who, and how, they should be. So many of us here are State School Proud. For us, this is a game-changing publication: urgent, fearless, provocative. Sophie is incredible and we could not be more proud and excited to be working with her.”
Pender commented: “I have been blown away by the momentum behind this book. And, as we state schoolers say, I am buzzing that it has landed with the team at Picador. I’ve spent a decade on the coalface of this issue, but I’ve avoided the harder conversations because it has allowed me to have a more comfortable life. I can no longer, in good conscience, continue to do that – we have not been paying attention to how our segregated educated system hurts all of us, regardless of the school you went to. In a world that feels increasingly polarised, I choose to believe that there is more that unites us than divides us. It’s time to take this conversation out of the shadows of politicised discourse in the media, or rows over a pint in the pub, and bring it into the national consciousness.”
