State school oxbridge bias

I didn't read the PEPF blog in the way others seem to here. I thought it was just making two sensible points that were worth sharing.

The first point was that 18% of A-level students are in private schools (and not the 7% that many people here and elsewhere quote). So, a random draw by a university would mean 82% state school entrants and 18% private schools.

The second point was that you want to compare students with the same A-level results (as this defines entry requirements for universities). So a random draw by a RG university with a AAA+ entry requirement would mean 75% state and 25% private. But in 2016-17 it was 77% state and 23% private.

I understand that the issue with this approach is that it assumes that state and private schools have effectively the same value added across a student's school life. But as others point out here (and also pointed out in the PEPF blog) the evidence on private school students getting better exam results than state school students when IQ, class, parental background etc. are conditioned for is at best very small (and increasingly even that small advantage is being contested by recent research, including from Plomin and colleagues at KIng's College using polygenetic scoring)

@puffyisgood I agree that access to Oxbridge is being given to kids with the same grades. The only exception is foundation courses which are rightly reserved for those who have been very disadvantaged - i.e. grown up in care etc.

I also agree that private school all things being equal results in higher grades. UCL has done a study showing the impact just at sixth form is the difference between AAA and AAB.

Private schooling is in no way a disadvantage for Oxbridge.

The guy tacitly admits that private school pupils may be over-represented at Oxbridge by citing the private schools' combined share of AAA+ grades, noticeably below their share of Oxbridge.

I think [I could barely bring myself to do more than skim read it] the main substance of his article is attacking a ludicrous strawman, namely that private schools' share of all pupils [c7%] should more or less exactly match their share of top university places.

Of course, nobody sensible is arguing for this. Private schools take kids who are stronger on average and dedicate vastly greater resources to educating them.

The latter point means that if two candidates [one state/one private] are exactly equal in IQ terms, 14 years in the private sector will have put the privately educated child a long way ahead, quite possibly so much further ahead for the gap to not be recoverable over the duration of a 3 year degree [which, let's face it, only consists of 3 lots of 20 weeks' worth of teaching followed by 3 years of exams].

Literally all the move towards wider Oxbridge access is doing is giving equal chances to state/privately educated kids with the same grades, not the same talent, the same grades. Such equality is something that hasn't historically existed.

@MsTSwift you can't compare those two numbers. Circa 18% of A-level students are in private education and 26% of students getting AAA attend independent schools (which is the entry requirement for numerous Oxbridge courses) based on 2019 results.

When the media use the 7% figure they are being intentionally misleading. The main way Oxbridge has been increasing state school representation is by outreach to all the talented state school students with the grades and ability to get in.

This is self serving bollocks ( and I send my DC to private school)

The argument goes, that private schools often select their intake (at least to some extent) by ability, whereas the vast majority of state schools do not. Ergo we should expect private schools to dominate Universities, BUT THAT SIMPLY ISNT TRUE. There's the small matter of parents like me having to find even for modest priced prep school , never mind senior school, the equivalent of £1000 a month!!

Therefore a child whose parents cannot afford a £1000 a month to attend a prep that prepares child for senior private school,, where fees rise to £1700+ for senior school, MISSES OUT on a school with music studio, teachers with PhD's , swimming pools, Yoga teachers, small classes, etc, etc, etc....Said child at state school who is just as bright misses out. The argument fails to consider that while a school like St Pauls indeed does recruit bright children, there's plenty of bright children who entertain applying because their parents are poor and bursary places are limited.

The article admits -There is also evidence that private schools on average develop the potential of their students more successfully than the state sector does.

Universities admissions which are run by very , very intelligent people know this and therefore use contextual offers to reflect the disadvantage children in the state system have.

When will parents with kids at private school admit ( like I gladly do) we send them there for a leg up, and SHUT UP about bias, its truly pathetic.

Even with contextual offers and Oxbridge and other top Uni's making noise about widening opportunity, take a look at Oxfords recent admissions.

State school percentage are shown and reflect state school applicants are only applying for traditional subjects that might pay off going to university - Medicine, Law , Maths and Computers, apart from very traditional humanities (History) , subjects like Classics, Theology or Music are completely dominated by private schools, Music is 45% private FFS. I know friends with DC at state schools which have skeletal music departments, my DC doesn't even attend a top prep school but they have a full music studio, choirs, and can learn pretty much any instrument they wish.

It was an example of some other factors that should be considered in the context of the (vague and woolly) headline.

"many private school students go to elite American universities."

@sheepdogdelight Source and stats for that quote please.

To quote you "More rigorous research needed"

@tadger98 The headline says "may be underrepresented".

They also may be overrepresented.

More rigorous research needed. And some more context applies. For example, many private school students go to elite American universities. So they won't show up on RG statistics.

@tadger98
Not exactly from an unbiased source.

Thought I would share some interesting research that suggests even back in 2016/17 private school students were under-represented at RG universities once you control for A-level grades. In other words, there is a bias towards state schools and not private schools:

Private school pupils may be underrepresented at top universities

It concludes: "This under-representation is likely to increase, the more the government pressurises our top universities into taking fewer students from the independent sector. Little wonder some private school heads have recently begun to complain about unfair treatment by universities of applications from their pupils."

St Paul's would be much better and give him much more all round than a state schools so yes it is worth paying for a vast number of reasons.

My children did not try for Oxbridge despite being in a faairly academic schools as they did not think they would get in because they did not think they were up to it academically and did not want to put the work in. Only about a third of these top schools try oxbridge anyway. Of my children 4 are London lawyers or almost and 3 went to Bristol and the numbers in higher paying jobs are just as high if you pick Durham/Bristol/Exeter v Oxbridge www.chambersstudent.co.uk/where-to-start/newsletter/law-firms-preferred-universities-2019 - that example is for lawyers so even if there were some anti private bias for Oxbridge which is 70% state school v 80% of sixth formers who go to state schools, it won't matter and he will do much better at St Paul's.

Public and private schools are still massively over represented though considering only about 7% of the population go to them and something like 70% of some colleges consist of private school pupils.

'I was told to go to Oxbridge. I couldnt find it on the map so went to Uxbridge instead' Brian Bilston poet.

If that's what the winter pool has become... it's a good thing. A tiny bit of pro state school bias after decades and decades of bias in the opposite direction?

Yes. All for it. Excellent!

I haven’t rtft but this stood out

Would you still have made the same decision re schools knowing this?

We had a choice between very selective private and good state comprehensive, and it’s easy to see the intake means high grades are more usual for all students in former

As for, eg, Tiffin v Eton, obviously Tiffin cannot compete with the financial advantages of Eton.

@Alexandria12 - plenty of parents will be making at least the suggested contributions, as plenty are wealthy enough to send their children to private schools should they really want to, and plenty are sufficiently invested in their children’s education that they tried to get their children into Tiffin in the first place. The suggested amount would not be so high otherwise, as it would cause massive uproar to ask for something the majority of parents considered utterly ridiculous and unaffordable. You also only have to read about the facilities at the school to see that it is a school that has benefited from a lot more than just the provision of the State, so it could well be considerably better off than the sorts of private school that are not able to be so academically selective and which are already struggling financially. Presumably this is why Oxford and Cambridge do not just do a knee jerk private v state analysis, but look at a variety of factors.

Also, I was actually comparing two grammar schools - Tiffin and Dover Grammar School for Boys, not Tiffin and a comprehensive school!

@Walkaround grammar schools are obviously not disadvantaged in comparison to comprehensives in poor areas. But I was comparing them to independent schools. Even if every parent at Tiffin contributes £520 (they won't) the fees at one of the nearby independents are 20k a year.

The higher the number of wealthy parents whose children attend any type of school, the more likely the school is to benefit from parental donations, so, eg Tiffin School will be considerably better off than, eg, Dover Grammar School for Boys. You only have to do a quick internet search to find Dover Grammar is appealing to parents to fundraise for pianos and has 18.6% of year 7-11 children on free school meals, whereas the Tiffin School Foundation invites regular and one off contributions, suggests parents donate £520 per year as a matter of course, and has 4.1% of children on free school meals. Both schools no doubt have fewer children on free school meals than the average for their local area, but somehow I do not feel Tiffin School is particularly disadvantaged in any way!

Can I just say about grammars they are not exactly the same as independents. The funding per pupil is much lower and the class sizes are larger. The number of lessons each teacher has to teach each week is also higher. So each teacher has less time and energy to spend on each student. There is also less money for enrichment activities and catch up. A child struggling with a language will not for example be able to spend more time with a language assistant as the resource is spread thinly.

The reason Tiffin etc do well in terms of oxbridge entrance and exam results is because they are incredibly selective at entry. They also probably have less issues with behaviour management and hence teacher recruitment than most comprehensives.

However it isn't right to say they are in the same category as independents when their funding is so much lower.

Well said!

@puffyisgood i suppose to be entirely 'fair' they'd have to apply this to every student that applies, foreign students included. Although the school with the most resources in my area has never performed better than the grammar with a lot less facilities so it's not that straight cut.

@sala7 absolutely, I'd forgotten about the winter pool issue. DC should be picked from that purely on merit and definitely not as part of any target meeting exercise. @PermanentTemporary the DC you mention is a classic case of the complexity of context.

@puffyisgood I am bemused by your assertion [the use of that term is quite high up on page of the guide to how to say you're ensconced in a bubble of extreme privilege without saying you're ensconced in a bubble of extreme privilege]. That is a very emotive and judgemental response to one term. Sorry but your theory is all wrong in my case, it is pure and simply lazy abbreviation! I'm not entirely sure what you are trying to say with your other points, other than WP and contextualisation are good things (agreed) and should be fair to all (also agreed). In my view the current levelling processes are a bit too blunt-edged but progress is being made. From my own experience, the biggest single barrier is actually getting state school DC to apply to Oxbridge in the first place. That is something that the outreach programmes are definitely moving in the right direction.

Focusing on just the overall number of kids is a bit daft - if it is 13% of A level candidates who are at private schools then you'd of course expect the private schools to have a higher share of top uni places than 13% because private schools do on average more selection than state schools [more than the average comp, less than the average GS, but there are so few GS's that all-pupils averages tend towards that of comps] and then have around double the teaching budget per head.

But when you've got the private schools exceeding the share of Oxbridge places that their share of AAA+ would predict, as they always have done and still do, even when a state school AAA+ has been achieved with half the resources, that's when it's just not acceptable.

E.g. the link here has a figure of 13% of all "entries", I think here "entry" probably means that 13% of all children who sit one or more A levels goes to a private school, rather than that 13% of all A level papers are submitted to an exam board for marking by a private school. I suppose that state candidates are probably likelier to have an A level or two maybe on their own or with a BTEC or something?

www.gov.uk/government/statistics/provisional-entries-for-gcse-as-and-a-level-summer-2021-exam-series/provisional-entries-for-gcse-as-and-a-level-summer-2021-exam-series