Peter Lampl

Sir Peter Lampl, OBE (born 1947) is a British philanthropist and Founder and Chairman of the Sutton Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation.

His father was a Viennese émigré who came to Britain in 1938. Lampl grew up in Wakefield and as the family moved to Surrey when he was 11 he was educated at Reigate Grammar School and Pate's (Cheltenham) Grammar School. He studied at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and the London Business School.

Lampl worked outside Britain for over twenty years, initially as a management consultant with The Boston Consulting Group in Boston, Massachusetts, Paris and Munich and then as an executive at International Paper the world's largest paper and forest products company, where he spent six years in senior management positions. In 1983 he set up the Sutton Company, a private equity firm with offices in New York City, London and Munich, and by the mid 1990s had become extremely wealthy.

Before setting up the Sutton Trust Lampl funded the campaign to ban handguns in the wake of the Dunblane massacre which resulted in a complete ban on handguns in the UK.

On his return from America Lampl was appalled to discover that nowadays "a kid like me had little chance of making it to Oxbridge", noting that his old grammar school was now "all fee-paying" and his old Oxford college "used to have lots of ordinary Welsh kids, but they're not coming through any more."

His first intervention was the creation of the Oxford Summer School, which gave bright 17-year-olds (from families where no one has been to university) the opportunity to spend a week at Oxford living in college, going to seminars and "hanging out with students who are already there." The scheme has since been rolled out to eleven other top universities.

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