Sir Peter: A life dedicated to creating fairer access to education

SIR Peter Lampl gave up a lucrative career in management consultancy and finance to try to create a fairer education system for children from poorer backgrounds.

Knighted for his work in 2003 he is admired across the education system for campaigning to narrow the education gap between rich and poor.

He describes how a physics teacher once told him: "The only way you'll ever go to Oxford, my boy, is on the bus!"

In fact, he studied at Corpus Christi college at Oxford and founded the Sutton Trust charity after visiting his old college 20 years on, in the Eighties, to find it had become less socially diverse since he left.

His father was a Czech refugee who came to England in 1938 and he grew up in modest circumstances in Wakefield, then Reigate and then Cheltenham.

He attended Reigate Grammar School before going to Oxford, and then attending the London Business School.

He once said: "When I was at Oxford the university was changing from something akin to a finishing school for academically inclined public school pupils to a university for the most talented, irrespective of background.

"There was a feeling we were in the early stages of establishing a genuine meritocracy.

"I visited Oxford again after many years working abroad and was surprised to find it had not opened up as we had expected.

"It had been transformed from a school drawn from all social classes to the preserve of children of the well-off."

The first initiative of the Sutton Trust was to set up a summer school at Oxford to encourage teenagers from poor backgrounds to apply to higher education. This now caters for 800 young people every year. Today the trust, with government backing, runs summer schools at 60 universities for 6,000 inner-city state school pupils a year.

He has been a key government adviser on education for many years and was a private guest of Tony Blair at Chequers when he was Prime Ministe r.

Gordon Brown praised his "life transforming" work at the trust's 10-year anniversary celebrations.