Are State School Oxbridge Students More Intelligent?

[sarahlayton06]

Are students who attended state comprehensive schools (especially poor-performing ones) and yet managed to get all 9s in their GCSEs and all A*s at A-level and get into Oxbridge inherently more intelligent than students who got similar grades and got into Oxbridge and other prestigious universities but went to private school or to a selective grammar school?

This is as without the privilege of better education, they may not have performed as well?

Have name changed for this, because it’s not a popular view, and for obvious reasons, it’s a difficult thing to say after so many years of ardently believing the opposite- I don’t even say it to my family. Apologies for the length of this post.

I went to Oxford from a state school in a very deprived part of the country. My comp was so bad that a number of kids, I would say, didn’t receive much of an education at all - the SEN kids, in particular, often watched videos all day and were sometimes (literally) sent to Tesco to do the teachers’ shopping. DH went to Cambridge from a similarly deprived part of the country. I got to Oxford and bristled at what I perceived as the unfairness of it. How could these people have this confidence? I raged inside at how unreasonable the system was. If I’m being absolutely honest with myself, I internally rolled my eyes at new people I met if they came from a privileged background, although I wouldn’t have admitted it out loud. In the opinion of some PPs, I should have been “more intelligent” than them. I was not. I am not. I was just good at passing exams and I was a bit of a slogger. My career has been pretty mediocre, although DH has been successful in his.

Both of my DDs are now at an independent school - partly because they both have SEN and I wouldn’t want them to go through the same things I’ve mentioned above. They are both significantly more intelligent than I am. The decision which I (not they) made when they were little because of the poor state of local SEN provision does not automatically make them stupid or change the IQ which they had the day before I made that decision.

I would however say that they are having a very different childhood to mine - primarily because they are absolutely working their backsides off, every single minute of every single day. They are often doing homework until 9pm, even in the holidays. I don’t necessarily agree with this and we are reconsidering whether this is what we want for them, but I am just pointing out that that is what lots of these private school kids will have been doing every single evening while I was out riding my bike and watching TV. I find this absolutely shocking, having lived such a different life. It doesn’t feel like the childhood I envisaged for them.

With the benefit of an adult perspective, I now look back at the private school kids with whom I was at Oxford. Was I more intelligent than they were? I don’t know. Possibly. Possibly not. Did they deserve the place as much as I did? Well, they had certainly spent probably twice as many hours as I had working towards it - and I thought I’d been working hard. I don’t know whether that should count for anything, but I also don’t think it is quite as simple as them having been spoon fed, or having an easy ride. Lots of them won’t have been out climbing trees or playing video games like the rest of us - whatever we think of the rights and wrongs of that.

In terms of raw, basic intelligence, I would also say that the school gate parent cohort at my daughters’ school is not a representative cross-section of society. It is certainly about as far as it’s possible to get from the parent cohort at my own primary school. I’m an Oxford-educated lawyer and I think I am possibly the least educated parent in my daughter’s class. The majority of other parents have PhDs. This may sound unlikely- I would once have rolled my eyes at the claim - but I promise you it’s true. (To be fair, lots of them are doctors and obviously lots of doctors do an extra PhD along the way - I don’t want to be misleading.) I’m just making the point that if genetics and maternal education levels have an influence on what we commonly call “intelligence”, the kids in this class did absolutely get a unreasonable head start in the lottery of life. I completely agree that that’s not fair - and I suspect that that would be the same at the school gate of lots of grammar schools or selective state schools or state schools in expensive leafy areas near teaching hospitals and universities, all across the country. It’s not fair at all - but it’s not really about school unfairness. To be brutally honest, that unfairness was baked in before they ever started school.

It’s not reasonable to assume that these kids are stupid and should never amount to anything and should never be allowed to have a university place because of a decision which somebody else made when they were 4 years old, over which they had no control at all. They’re just kids.

Also went from a deprived background to Oxford. I think what you’re failing to consider is that having the time and space and teaching and parental support to concentrate on homework and revision is in itself a privilege. Our house was tiny and overcrowded and the tiny kitchen was full of food prep and my childminder mother’s mindees. I had to do my homework till the day I left school lying down on my bottom bunk. There was no room for a desk in any of the bedrooms. Plus I was working a lot of PT jobs (FT in school holidays), which limited my time for school work — I was up at 5 am often as a relief milker, I did factory work, retail, fruit picking etc. My parents needed my wages. So yes, private school kids spent far longer working towards their Oxford place than I did. That was pretty much the only thing I envied. I’d have loved good teachers, someone to help with my applications, and a desk and time for homework.

But what struck me when I got to Oxford was how babyish my more privileged cohort were in comparison. I felt years older than most of them. And cleverer, definitely.

But isn’t your child still at an advantage since due to the fact you’re on this forum knowledgable about his circumstances and concerned whereas some parents are ignorant about the entire education system (especially immigrants) or simply couldn’t care less (while you seem to care)?

BlushPine, that’s really impressive, and you sound formidable. However, I think that sort of supports my point. It wasn’t that you were specifically disadvantaged only when compared to your private school peers. You would also have been disadvantaged compared to me (child of two teacher parents) and most of my state school educated friends at Oxford (incidentally, almost all the children of teachers). We definitely all came from supportive homes, with bedrooms of our own in which to work, and families who prioritised education above almost everything else. That had nothing to do with the type of school we’d attended. That’s what I mean when I say that much of a child’s advantage is baked in before they ever walk through the gates of a school - state or private. I’m sure you are more intelligent than me.

I am also embarrassed to admit that my I would have been incredibly immature at 18. My parents thought education was such a priority that I wasn’t doing my own laundry before I went to college, let alone making regular financial contributions to the household. In retrospect, the mind boggles - I’ll be bringing my girls up differently! But again, it’s just too broad a brush to say that these judgements only apply to “private school pupils”. My path to Oxford was smoothed as much as my parents could possibly could smooth it, even though we didn’t have enormous amounts of spare money. Most of my state school friends from college were in the same position.

It’s a tricky one, but I suspect that if we instead asked “are the children of supportive parents (who read with their kids every night and supported them financially and took them to lots of extra curricular activities and had discussions about current affairs at the dinner table) less intelligent than the children of parents who did not do those things?”, people would be less keen to make blanket judgements, so it’s unlikely that that will be pursued as a further line of investigation on this thread… 😄

It can be a bit of a shock, too, to pupils who have been the stars in their sixth form to get to a top uni and be in an entire year group of stars. Half the girls in my school got all As at A level (pre A*), and several did county level sports, or chess, or debating, or drama, too. Most of the rest got AAB or AAAB at A level.

Not necessarily more intelligent no, but would likely have had to work harder and overcome more obstacles.

Higher for A levels, " As many as 18% of England’s school pupils aged 16–19 are in the private sector"

https://ifs.org.uk/inequality/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Private-schools-and-inequality.pdf

I was Far better than the snooty private educated students in my class who would often say to me 'we deserve to be here more than some of the rest of our class'

@hellohellooo do you agree with this suggestion?

Top universities including Oxford and Cambridge have been given the green light to move away from “traditional” exams in a bid to boost the grades of minority groups and poorer students.
The elite British institutions could move towards more “inclusive assessments” such as open-book tests or take-home papers instead of in-person, unseen exams in an effort to close the grades gap

Let me take a look

My DD got 8A*s and 3As at GCSE from a standard comprehensive school and didn’t experience any violence there. Not all state schools only offer 8 GCSEs.

Why do you care Op? Have you been triggered by some sort of inferiority complex and now trying to make some kind of point that the struggle of the so-called impoverished state school life vs private school life means these Oxbridge state school kids are somehow inherently 'better'?

Also what the fuck does intelligence even mean? How do you measure it? It is measured in happiness? How well one does in exams? How quickly one can tie one's shoes? How much hot air one can produce out of one's arse by asking stupid questions?

I think state school high achievers can be better at self study, which is good for university. Less spoon feeding of knowledge.

Nope

Perhaps more resilient

The one thing that frustrates me about these threads is they are always full of people 40+ who tell some random anecdote about “when they were there” and think it’s even remotely relevant to what a university looks like now and who it accepts now. It isn’t. Even most of the fellows/dons/tutors are younger than you and institutions and acceptance methods and policies have moved on drastically!