I would like to respond to the questions about whether Russell Groups are biased against private schools and whether these day private school students are unfairly losing out. In my view they are not.
I've seen many threads in MN HE forum saying this. This belief is part of the reason I started this thread. However, I don't know that there is much I can say to convince parents who believe this, as it seems to be a very deeply held sense of being wronged.
About 6 - 7 % of the UK population goes to private schools. If there were no bias against either school type you would expect to see a roughly proportional representation in the intake for a university. However, here's the data for Oxford, in 2021 68% of the Oxford intake was state school. So private schools account for about 32% of the Oxford intake. So you can easily see they are still significantly more likely to get in relative to their proportion of the UK population, from 7% to 32%.
That's before you consider that 'state school' is very broad, and includes grammar or selective entry schools with students from mostly middle class and professional families, or great schools in areas with high house prices, to under-resourced schools serving the most disadvantaged communities in our country. That 68% intake isn't all 'WP' students by any means! They will be a small proportion of it. State school does not equal disadvantaged, it is just one crude measure that is easy to report on as a broad indicator.
I think there are a few things going on here. Private school parents want and expect return on their investment. The schools sell themselves as pathways to elite universities. So it is a natural expectation that has built up over the years, and an anger when it doesn't work out as expected.
It is uncomfortable to think that perhaps someone else was just that little bit more brilliant than your child, or it was an unlucky day at interview for your child and they fluffed it, or that all the interview coaching, fees and expensive extra curricular clubs have not paid off.
There has been big investment and research into widening participation, good practice and the policy evidence base over past 10-20 years. And we are starting to see a gradual impact in the Russell Group intake. Look again at that Oxford page above and you see in 2017 that 58% of the intake was state school, so it has gone up quite a bit by 2021 with 68%. I think this figure partially represents the effort that universities and schools have put into widening participation, developing contextual admissions policies and refining their processes to remove bias where they can. And private schools and parents have noticed this so they feel angry.
It is often framed (not in this thread but I've seen this approximate wording) as one private student pitted against a WP student and thus unfairly losing out on a 'rightful' place to someone who got in by a back door / sob story or however you want to phrase it. I really want to push back on this feeling that anyone had a 'right' to anything because of the fees they paid.
The WP students I worked with didn't feel they had a 'right' to a place. A lot of the work was building their confidence and reassuring that they had as much right to apply, and if they got in, to attend and take up space, as anyone else. Some of them were very grateful and overwhelmed just to be considered.
Also: admissions doesn't work like that, just comparing 2 individual candidates. It is a high volume process. You get loads of applications; you weed out the completely ineligible ones. The WP students may get a 'flag' against their application for additional consideration, but everyone is being assessed in one big pool. It is a large complex filtering process.
It is just as likely that any one private school student 'lost out' to another private school student, or grammar school student, or a middle class state student, or an international student - any of whom may have had better results, statements, interview or test performance - as it is that they 'lost out' to a WP student.