Diane Reay
Diane Reay is a sociologist and academic, who is Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge. She is noted for her study about educational inequalities among students in state schools in the United Kingdom. She has maintained that there is a tendency to misuse the school selection practice to transform social class differences into education. For instance, she criticized the Oxbridge application process as "institutionally racist".Background
Reay is the daughter of a coal miner and the eldest of eight children. She was raised on a council estate and was given free school meals while a young student. In an interview, she said, "I learned as a small child I had to work at least twice as hard as the middle class children to achieve the same result."
She taught in London primary school for 20 years before she began work at Cambridge, where she is currently an emeritus professor of sociology of education.
