IF THERE is one thing that I would stick in Room 101 it’s private schools.

I’m not a staunch Labour supporter, but I would back them wholeheartedly were they to fulfil their pledge to abolish fee-paying schools and ‘integrate’ them into the state sector.

It is wrong that we live in such an unequal society, whereby private school pupils are given a huge head start in life, nurtured and presented with far greater opportunities at a young age.

Getting such a leg up should not depend upon your parents’ income.

A study by researchers at Durham University found that pupils educated in the independent schools sector are two years ahead of their state school peers by the time they reach 16. They compared early educational performance with students’ GCSE exam results and found the ‘private school effect’ was evident in every subject.

Only last week news emerged of the woeful gulf in funding for music and the arts generally, between private and state schools.

If private schools did not exist, and every parent was banging the same drum, throwing their collective weight behind state education, standards would certainly rise.

Not that all state schools are bad schools. Many are superb. My own children went to the local state school and despite a few niggles, I couldn’t complain.

But state schools lag behind. You only have to look at Oxbridge admissions to see that. Two or three places offered every year is standard for good state schools. If you look at the number of Oxbridge entries from private schools, it is far greater.

At the top private schools, virtually half the sixth form line up for the annual ‘Oxbridge offers’ photograph. At Westminster School in London, for example, in the past five years, an average of between 70 and 80 pupils each year have been offered places at Oxford and Cambridge. This has got to be wrong.

I also believe that it is important for children to be educated in an environment where they are rubbing shoulders with people from all income brackets, experiencing a cross-section of life. In other words, the real world.

It is sad that so many people have no confidence in the state system. My sister is unusual among her London friends in sending her son to a state school.

Scrapping private schools would also eliminate the likelihood of having a government made up of ministers who spend all their lives in a bubble of privilege - Eton, Oxbridge, House of Commons, Lords. Many of them will never have set foot in a sink estate. It is disturbing to see those old school photographs in national newspapers, showing Eton or Harrow year groups, with circles drawn around those in top government jobs. You would be lucky to get one circle in 50 years from most state schools.

My own husband was raised in one of these private school bubbles. Boarding - a damaging practice that should be banned outright - from a young age, he didn’t experience real life until he went to college aged 18.

In fact, just the other night, while watching a TV documentary about an unruly state school, with huge class sizes and over-stretched teachers fighting to keep order, he asked me: “Is it really like this?”

For the umpteenth time I relayed my own experience at a good comprehensive school, telling him of classes populated by kids who banged desk tops, threw pens and fought between themselves throughout the lessons.

And while teacher training I was placed on teaching practice at a London school with three teachers to a class. It was terrifying.

Eliminating fee paying schools is the best way to bring about a more level playing field across the country. It would go some way to ending the elitism that divides us, the gulf that exists between the privately and state educated. And there is no doubt there is one, even in my own home.