Resident doctors synicsl strike again

@mumsneedwine But they (how many?) are not typical of the school population wanting to be doctors as a whole. They are complete outliers. You won’t find this situation in many areas. Refugees in council housing - maybe.

@Marchesman I don’t think medical schools are choosing the right candidates either. One would imagine the increased numbers are allowing applicants to get selected who would not normally? Would I trust a university of Buckingham medic being trained at MK hospital? Possibly not.

I’ve found some doctors see patients as an inconvenience. I also agree about the NHS. They cannot sort anything out. The staff go on strike.

Working class is interesting. I know umpteen people whose parents were working class. Mainly because they didn’t pass the 11 plus and had no chance as dc. They often worked locally and rose up via company training and they did get onto courses via work and saw the benefits education brings. Idiots like Starmer say they are working class, but he never was. His mum had a profession. My fil was a toolmaker too. That was considered skilled work. No qualifications because the war interfered but they bought a house and had a car. DH had a grammar school education but left any notion of being working class behind and went to university. Millions of people did this or did part time study like me. We were very poor but weren’t working class. All of us went to grammar schools. The working class is now difficult to define but so many are now middle class, the small numbers for some polar numericals doesn’t surprise me at all. There are not vast untapped extremely bright dc battling against the odds in large numbers. I do think we need the best to be recruited to robust courses.

Pot.

@poetryandwine My grandfathers and father were working class, so diversity is personally attractive, and a diverse peer group is probably more fun, but by prioritising diversity a complete dog's breakfast has been made of medicine.

The educational literature is overcrowded with articles telling us that high academic attainment is a barrier for admission to the medical profession. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-019-1918-y before theorising why this is a bad idea and pushing DEI initiatives. Cambridge did a similar thing with their general admissions, but unlike medicine they backed off a few years ago, because they were, as you showed, having little effect in improving low SES admission rates; and their results were starting to look embarrassing - privately educated students, for example, are currently 50% more likely to achieve firsts than state educated students.

No one has bothered to look at the consequences of DEI for medicine but we know that prior attainment predicts success in postgraduate exams, GMC sanctions etc. We know at Cambridge, there were no examples of any non-academic characteristics associated with disadvantage having a positive effect on undergraduate examination performance. We know that the content of medical degrees has been reduced as the ability of the intake has declined, and the graduates from these courses overestimate their abilities. Despite this, more than 80% of medical graduates are not satisfied at the prospect of being doctors, at least in the NHS. It is therefore not possible to argue that we are selecting the right people. In the private sector things would sort themselves out, here not so much.

They are my students so I know them v well. You are v welcome to come and meet them - just drop be a DM.

Bless you. Poshos ?? None that I know. They all went to the local comp. Many lived in council flats.

This thread has gone way off topic.

And we should stop pretending that doctors are in any way impoverished. They are mostly poshos to start with, they are striking because they want to earn even more money. And it's all the expense of people who earn much less than them, many of whom are themselves impoverished.

I did not find your comment funny at all and your other comments on this thread show you don't really have a filter.

At least her reply was witty!

It was a reply in kind. @mumsneedwine hardly used the word ‘dear’ as a term of endearment, as you are very well aware.

Your comment was inappropriate.

The only person who calls me ‘dear’ is my Granny.

I think Cambridge do interview more. The Cambridge POLAR 4 statistics for the three years 2022-2024 Medical School admissions are

Q1 55 acceptances, 7.4% of acceptances
Q2 64 acceptances, 8.6% of acceptances

In other words, applicants from areas of the UK in the bottom 40% in terms of participation in HE represent only 16% of those who accepted offers to study Medicine at Cambridge over these three years, and those from the bottom 20% represent only 7.4% of acceptances. Almost everyone who received an offer accepted; that isn’t the problem.

55 acceptances is only 18-19 a year. Nothing to get giddy over.

Oxford admits fewer students. Q1 acceptance to medical school is only about 14% and, sadly, the higher the school is ranked the lower the Q1 acceptance rate.

No one here has captured my views exactly. I think it is good for society to see diverse faces in all professional roles, certainly including doctors. I know some horrific instances of superbly qualified minority female doctors (even consultants) subject to abuse by patients, partly I think because they are so exceptional in the current system. Economic diversity amongst patient facing doctors is important, also. It is good to stretch the conscious and unconscious biases of the middle class!

Ideally the talented who have lacked middle class enrichment opportunities would be offered free after school, holiday and summer opportunities from an early age so that they could compete on an equal footing. But this is not really feasible at scale. So I think there is a place for limited contextual offers. They work well in my School.

I want competent doctors. I think we should prioritise the British trained, but those who can’t make it - and I think a traditional early years curriculum makes this clearer, sooner - should perhaps be off ramped earlier, as PG students are, with good career pathways.

On an unrelated note, I think it is axiomatic that we should never generalise. The most intelligent fellow I know - and considering my circle, that’s saying a lot - comes from a background most MumsNetters would sneer at. My own tutees have been full of surprises, too. The Cambridge data above and much more shows that you are broadly right, but all the more reason to keep our eyes peeled for the gems.

Are you a granny @poetryandwine?

Or are you calling @mumsneedwine a granny?

@poetryandwine I think C interview more applicants than O don’t they? I think the important stat is how many do they actually take from the background I commented on below.

As we can see, blanket policies capture exceptional schools and very intelligent families who just choose to live where they do and work out that’s advantageous. I have every suspicion doctors come from these families not the ones with multiple fathers, domestic violence and no one in the family working, plus low level attainment of their parents and grandparents. The odds are these dc are not going to be doctors in any meaningful numbers.

What @Marchesman says is consistent with what I have heard in presentations at STEMM admissions conferences.

I was given to understand that Oxford lays on extra support for applicants from certain backgrounds, and may sometimes admit them if they miss their offer by one grade. Both Oxford and particularly Cambridge [claim to] prioritise applicants from Q1 and other underrepresented backgrounds for interview.

But admissions tutors have a lot of flexibility.

I'm not sure either, but that's what they say, and their research shows that it is, in general, the correct approach:

"The Colleges of the University of Cambridge take several types of contextual information that can be indicative of disadvantage into account as part of their holistic assessment of applicants, but in contrast to many other highly selective Universities, they do not systematically reduce the standard offer level for admission of such applicants (also known as making differential offers, or as the practice of contextual admissions)".

Because:

"The findings did not provide support for the idea that the potential of students with characteristics associated with disadvantage was underestimated by their A Level attainment, or for differential offers. None of the non-academic characteristics associated with disadvantage had any significant positive effects on examination performance (which would be expected if performance was underestimated by A Levels), but nearly all of them were at least sometimes found to have statistically significant (albeit usually quite small) negative effects, and otherwise had non significant effects.
The negative effects were seen for students from maintained schools or ones with few recent Oxford/Cambridge offers, from low IMD quintile areas, ethnicities other than White, declared disability, mature, female, and care experienced students. This suggests that each type of disadvantage may, at least in some circumstances, individually contribute to a constraining impact on the translation of a student’s potential into their actual Cambridge examination performance".

https://www.cao.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/differential_offers_paper_for_publication.pdf

Is there anyone with enough patience to explain to mumsneedwine, preferably in words of one syllable, why a graduate of a 5 year PBL course with BBC at A-level differs from a graduate of a traditional 6 year Cambridge degree with 3 A stars at A-level?

@mumsneedwine You will find very few students in the circumstances you specifically described become doctors. There are poorer folk from highly educated backgrounds but the parents are often choosing to do little because they don’t need to. I’m not out of touch but you are referring to a specific set of circumstances and medical school. You don’t have any idea of how msny dc get to medical school when living 7 in a 2 bed tower block flat and working for food as well as taking 3 hard A levels. You simply don’t know this from any data. So you make up a story to suit your ends.

Oh I wish I was !!! My kids are far too career focussed though so no little ones around yet. Can not wait though. I will definitely retire then.

Happy Easter to all our wonderful young doctors, working today or not. I'll be beeping you on the picket lines next week. Thanks for all you do ❤️

Edit: wrong to say this

No one on this thread has suggested otherwise. Your last sentence suggests you think I am wring to say this, so find a post that does.

I plan to, Granny

Yes dear. Have a lovely Easter

You cared enough about Maths to keep responding, except that you ignored the one with the data showing your misunderstanding of how FM is used.

It does matter because MumsNetters have other DC and may wrongly think their DC are not eligible for certain degree programmes because they lack FM, if they go by what you write.

I am never surprised anymore about the lack of awareness in this country about how many people live in real poverty. And how dare these kids have aspirations and be as bright as there's !!!!

Thankfully Unis, especially the beloved favourite 5, really love these kids as they know how hard they have worked to achieve. Oxbridge outreach is outstanding and why so many of our choose to go there - that and they are cheap !

Oh yes they do (we could start a whole panto !). There is a range of offers given by Oxbridge. And contextual data is not just about economics. Surely you know this ???? Richer kids get contextual offers too if young carers or have been in care etc.