Her Discussions by Dr Faye - Why Your School Still Determines Your Future | Mini Episode

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Another Thursday, another mini episode!Every Thursday, we’re sharing the Buy or Bye Bye segment from one of your favourite Her Discussions episodes - a breakdown of what actually works for your health. This week, we're revisiting our episode with Sophie Pender, founder of the 93% Club and Forbes 30 Under 30, who built the UK's biggest network for state educated people after realising that class in the workplace was the one thing nobody was talking about honestly.In the full episode, we discuss:🚌 How private vs state schools still shape your opportunities in the UK 📚 Why only 7% of the UK is privately educated, but they dominate top careers 📈 #1 reason why classism is at an all time high in the UK 🏢 Dealing with judgement at work and university 🏠 How your home & childhood life shapes what you think is ‘normal’Listen to the full podcast here:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/608ceOHmlUgoDDq2u9q6LJ?si=plhN53MjSTmOB1iv8rV0Dg YouTube: https://youtu.be/R19_Ph5m6XA?si=QYxOg1GMG5OlO7wu Please don’t forget to subscribe - it really helps us grow the podcast.Resources & links mentioned:Sophie Pender’s Instagram -  @sophieapender  The 93% Club - https://www.93percent.club/Can I ask you a BIG favour? 💙Please leave a review or rating. It helps us grow the podcast and bring you more amazing guests.Share this with someone who wants to protect their brain, boost focus, or live smarter, it might help them feel more energized and confident.Follow us on social media or join the broadcast channel to send us your questions for our guests:Podcast Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/herdiscussionspod/⁠⁠Broadcast channel: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/channel/AbY4liwxlLnewx4H/⁠⁠ 🛑 Disclaimers & legal:This podcast is for educational / informational purposes only and does not constitute medical, legal, or financial advice. All opinions are those of the speaker(s).

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own one that I haven't put down. It's a bit of a surprise wild card. Okay. Came off a conversation that I had literally two days ago. Okay, nice. Oxbridge, buy or bye by. I'm just laughing at the B in Oxbridge being big. I think that's the most stakes cool thing ever. Bridge. Buy or by bye. Do you know what? I'm going to say bye. Yeah.

Reason being is that when people think about social mobility, they tend to swing one way or the other. They think about silver bullets and solutions, right? They're like, well, the key to solving social mobility is that we won't hire anyone from Oxbridge anymore. And my point is, no, there are working class kids at Oxbridge. They're in the 93% Club. Go and hire those ones because they got there and they worked their ass off.

Although I will say, I got an interview. Oxford for English. I think there was like 11 of us there for nine spaces and they asked me what books I'd read and I said Harry Potter and then I never saw them again. And I got my feedback which was four out of ten. So from my interview, obviously no one had never interviewed for Oxford before. I had to sit an exam to get an interview. So by that point they knew I was, so my predicted grades were like high. Yeah. I had to sit an exam to actually get an interview and then I had to submit my own written work to get an interview. So the interview was the final, final stage.

That is... So I'm spiked. Bye, I'm joking. That is classist in a way that is a little bit not overtly classist. Harry Potter is the most successful book for a lot of kids. You're not going to have an original copy of Witherin Heights sat on your 4,000-year-old library.

There was a guy there who had a copy of Chaucer. Do you even know what Chaucer? I do. So Chaucer is like this old English book. like it's based in a middle-english, old English language that you don't read until you were in like second or third year of uni and he had it under his arm. And I was at the interview because you actually meet the other candidates

that you interview with. So like you actually meet them and you saw at that point, I know I was cooked. So I was perfect. I was cucked. So yeah, I'm pro Oxbridge in that like I feel like there are working class kids at Oxbridge and like identify them, find them hire them as well as everyone else.

Obviously Oxford is not the be all and end all. But yeah, I think that there's a little. lot to be desired in terms of the culture there. And there was a policy. I mean, there was this thing recently about one of the colleges introducing a policy to try and get more private schoolers in. I saw that. I was just like, God, you guys are so lame. Like, well, there was a comment that I left on one of yours Instagram posts, which was one of my experiences at medical school was being, you know, private school passing. Like, well, clearly they hadn't spot the intruder that I was. in this circle it was like nine people eight of which were privately educated and they

me being the nine and to be clear and they were all talking about how much harder it was for them to get into medical school because they were privately educated because of like affirmative action and whatever and I was sat there and I was like if you've had an education which is 50,000 pounds a year I hope you get into Oxbridge I hope they make you the head of Oxbridge you know what I mean if you can't if you can't get in to a university like that with that amount of education I'm like well that was money wasted yeah like what yeah yeah well also that That's just not true as well. But also, like, can we count?

Let's count. Let's use our basic numeracy. There are eight of us sat around this table. And multiple others in the year, it's clearly not that much harder. Yeah. And actually, when we finish by or bye, I'm going to need you to explain the naming of the 93% club. Because we completely glossed over that part. And I think that's so, so important.

Okay. So Oxbridge is... Not sure about them. We had nuance. And I'm a big fan of nuance. Yeah. Not by no. By-bye.

I didn't even finish. For the listeners, for the listeners, unpaid internships. Bye-bye. Yeah. But also lots of, people are sneaky with unpaid internships, right? So, unpaid internships actually have been banned in a lot of places. However, work experience has not. Yeah.

So I've been in places before where they have a policy of banning unpaid internships, which are basically, because people, people, People used to advertise internships online and they'd be formal internships that'd be unpaid. Now there are 15 and 16 year olds who are children of clients just coming through the back doors in work experience. So the whole lot. Yeah, it's sneaky. The 93% Club did this big survey called the big state school survey. Like 10,000 people answered it. And I think... A lot of you guys as well because I put up my story. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It was crazy because one of the big things that came out was we actually asked a question of whether or not unpaid internships has actually been stopped.

And like the vast majority, I think it was like two thirds of people who answered said that they'd been forced to babysit. They essentially look after the child of an exec or a client. I also think there's something really interesting here about AI and how that's going to start transforming how people get opportunities. In what way? Because AI is going to democratise access to information, right? You can type into AI, you know, things that are all over the internet. And actually that's going to mean that loads of working class kids probably have access in a way they haven't had before.

But the problem is everyone's using AI to make their applications. So employers can no longer see the wood from the trees. Because everyone's applications look the same. So what that means is that people are going to start relying more on referrals and quality assurance. Because if I'm reading two applications that sound the same because they're AI, I just want someone to tell me who, who, I won't make my job easier. Who do you think is better? And so that obviously benefits people that have the connections.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Networking events. Oh, I would say bye. Networking events buy.

I think that networking events need to be a bit more structured though. If you have a networking event and you're kind of expecting people just to like raw dog it, then you're benefiting people who have spent their like, networking who are already familiar with, you know, oh, so, you know, here's small talk. If you're not used to that environment, you don't really know what the social contract is. So sometimes the students that, you know, are in the 93% club, they'll walk into a networking event and they don't actually know what they're meant to be doing there. They don't really understand how to get the most out of it.

So I'm a big fan of networking events, but I think that you need to make it super clear up front, who's going to be there, explain, you know, what you should be doing in the room. And then also just make it super easy to follow up after as well. Like just make things like super clear, super transparent. If you've been brought up to network, which I think if you're listening and you went to a private school, you disagree with this. I would say it's not necessarily like you've had lessons on networking. It's just I found with my experience with friends who went to private school, socially they can interact with different age groups better, I find. Yeah.

I find it really difficult to interact with people who are older than me or like, interact with my peers in a professional sense. I can interact with my peers in a social sense, but you put me in a professional sense and I suddenly feel like a fish out of water. I think that private school kids tend to do that a lot better and be a lot more relaxed with it.

And I find this like, I hate networking events. And I will find the first person who will talk to me. I'll cling on to them. Kling on to them for dear fucking eyes. Which is like, I'm like, I need to stop doing this. I can't, this is not useful. I wait for someone else out of a toilet one

who then shook me off. But do you know, why I think that is. Do you know why I think that you find it harder? Yeah. It's that point I come back to that I was sort of, you know, stating my mum about, which is that when I was growing up, you know, and this is not, this is not to slight my mum or anything, but like I would sit and eat dinner with a tray on my lap and just watch TV. Like no one, you know, I wasn't talking about current affairs or I wasn't talking about, you know, what's going on in the world or like, oh, did you see this or did you see that?

Like there's an element of that kind of that small talk that you are equipped with comes to you if you grew up in a middle class family and your parents are in the city and they've seen what's happened in the news and that's the topic of conversation at the table. You can walk into an event and be ready to talk about that sort of thing. And that's also why when working class kids transition to a university setting, particularly where you have a sort of a seminar or tutorial, they find it a lot harder to transition because you're suddenly being asked what your opinion is as opposed to write it down.

Yeah. So actually there's an element of networking events. Again, they lend themselves to people who have grown up being spoken to as if they're adults already. That's what also I find in state schools versus private schools. The relationship with teachers is so different. Like I remember when one of my friends was telling me that the teachers were invited to their 18th birthday party that they had at the family home. Like they had like the family home. It's always at the family home, not the second home.

Do you know what I mean? So she was saying that her friend, her parents were hosting her 18th birthday party. Yeah. And it was more of like a family, family friends and the teachers were invited. Like, I think, I don't think that's the case for everyone. But even just if you're at a boarding school, like your relationship with your teachers is different. It's a bit more adult. It's a bit more peer to peer.

Yeah. Which in state schools are like prison. Like a lot of the times state schools have to operate like prisons. Well, you know what the thing is? But I also think it's given their credit. It's also pastoral. Yeah. So actually in state schools, there is more of a parent-child relationship because there has to be.

Yeah. So actually, because the kids are going through. So there's behavioural stuff, right? But actually, usually that's because the kids are going through quite a lot. Yeah. So the teachers are having to step in and not just teach them. Like, I think state school teachers would love just to walk into a classroom and be like, and this is, oh, yeah, like, here's a topic of conversation.

But actually they're coming in and being like, oh, like, there's a child that's hungry and they're distracted because of that. Or, you know, there's a child who actually like, maybe they're having a really. traumatic home life. So state school teachers are having to do pastoral work as well, which switches the dynamic. It means they're spending more time checking in on the kid to make sure that they're okay. And so actually, it's quite funny because I've got really close relationships with my teachers, particularly my sixth form teacher. But I actually don't think it was because we like, sort of like, we're having like academic conversations. It was because she saw me when I was like crawling out of my shift at McDonald's. And she was, she like, she like,

saw me and made sure that I was okay. So there's like a real love there as well. But yeah, it's totally different. Yeah. And yeah, that does impact how you feel around in like networking events later on. Yeah. Seeing yourself is almost, yeah, like an equal in some ways. Yeah.

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At participate in McDonald's restaurants in Canada, product availability varies by restaurant. So someone in our network actually got sent for elocution lessons, not by us obviously, but when they were when they were at uni I think bye bye I do know what it's really difficult is like I think I'm a realist I'm a realist I'm a realist I'm a realist I'm a realist I'm quite pragmatic which is that I think that there are two jobs to be done to make sure that people feel like they can be themselves yeah that they don't have to change their accent they don't have to

change the way they present. And I think that that work is essential. And that's what I do with state school proud and talking about, you know, the stuff that happened to me. At the same time, I'm also pragmatic. And I know that that bit takes a long time. So at the same time, you need to be real with people and you need to say, actually, honestly, this might be how you need to present so you can get in the door. Yeah. I think the key thing is to remind people that they are presenting and being a chameleon rather than fundamentally changing because what I did was fundamentally change myself

as opposed to realising that I was context switching and I think that's like the key difference there on the elocution stuff I remember I was in a law firm interview and the interviewer refused to start the interview until I pronounce water correctly because I said water And I don't really pronounce my teas that much.

I think like now like it's like a soft tea. Like when you have like it's kind of like an estuary like London accent. Like I say, rather than accent, it's accent. But he refused to start the interview until I said water. I couldn't say water either. It had to be water. So he refused to start it. Thank you for listening.

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