To scream, "Your Private School Children Are Not Being Discriminated Against at Uni"

[Triffid1]

Between work and social I seem to have a pretty diverse group of people who I engage with regularly but as my DC are at an age where we're thinking about high schools, there have been quite a few conversations around this recently. I have now had not one but THREE separate conversations with parents who are planning to send their children to private schools who have expressed concern that it might "disadvantage" them because the universities are prioritising state school children.

Clearly, every time someone says this, I immediately move them further down the pile of people I want to hang out with. But why is this so prevalent? Yesterday, talking with a client on Zoom, where he was ringing from his lovely home office in his leafy suburb of London I didn't actually know what to even say but I wanted to yell, "FFS, if there's a small shift so that the small number of private school children don't get the majority of places at the top universities, you'll have to live with it." Instead I simply changed the subject politely. Argh.

My sons are in private primary school. We chose this rather then state as he is quite bright and would struggle in a class of a 30.

It really isn't about anything other than the tiger-ish will to succeed. The most determined will take the top places on the podium, because they will work longer and harder than anyone else to improve their inherited innate abilities.

@moch11

camaleon - there are some very economically deprived children at top independent schools. They don’t really give out full bursaries to middle-income families. My daughter had friends in Mayfair and equally, friends who lived at the top of tower blocks where they were terrified to use the lifts. There are all kinds of cultural and religious challenges too for many of her friends. The school goes into certain primaries (or secondaries re-16+ entry) and identifies children there that may have potential, but whose parents might never think of applying. They run Saturday classes throughout Year 5 for these children to get them up to speed with what they will encounter in the exam and interview. Once in the school, they are never denied trips or opportunities on the basis of ability to pay - there is a fund and everything is covered from uniform to international trips. But they still face poverty at home - the school can’t change that. My daughter’s friend lived in one of the most notorious towers blocks in this part of London. Her dad was long gone. Her brother was in prison apparently. Her mother barely coping and possible mental health problems. She got four A*, but not a single medicine offer in this cycle. This is not uncommon at all. She is now having to take a gap year. Things are very intense for her at home and she is displaying some odd behaviours more recently - ie taking herself to A&E all the time. She has wondered if she might have got offers if she had stayed at her original school which was ok academically, all girls and about 80% Muslim. Who knows really, but I feel bad for her and others in a similar position.

This is extremely odd story re: your deprived student. We distinguish very well in admissions between children who are in from deprived background and on bursary and those who are not. We would still probably expect more in an interview (because let’s be fair - even a deprived student in a private school had access to more opportunities and education). But she fits objective deprivation criteria she will get objective significant advantage (eg needing much lower scores to be invited to interview - where she would stand out and be given generally speaking way more opportunity to show herself than a less than impressive Westminster student with whatever amount of A*s)

@BFrazzled How can you tell from an application whether someone has a bursary (which is now quite a high percentage of students at private schools I believe?). I don’t remember putting anything like that down, do the applications ask that question directly?

From personal statement and teacher recommendation letter.

BFrazzled - yes, I understand what you’re saying and also that there is other evidence such as POLAR quintiles etc. Can it be a bit of a blunt instrument sometimes through in a borough such as Kensington & Chelsea where there are such extremes of privilege alongside extreme of deprivation? Are postcodes always accurate enough? I don’t know. Anyway, she didn’t get any offers. She’s far from being the only one. I can say that for sure, but then it wasn’t really a normal admissions cycle this year.

@moch11 with Medicine it is about a lot more than just the academics too. Work experience is important, the clinical aptitude exams and interviews play a big part. It is not unusual for DC with all A stars at A level not to get places as it is only part of the selection criteria.

Yes, also I think she said that her parents forgot to apply for the free school meals or they couldn’t understand the form or something. So she didn’t meet that contextual flag.

@wellards

There are of course people who attend private schools on a full bursary. I know someone who does, his home life is not a bed of roses and without the bursary he would have gone to a rather crappy state comprehensive (no grammars in our area). Should he be disadvantaged over another student with a similar home set up (five/six people in a two bed flat and three generations of his family)?

The vast majority are not from impoverished backgrounds. Why do you think the boy you know is disadvantaged? Why do you think he deserves the place over someone from a similar background but not at a private school?

You are playing disadvantage olympics here. I simply said I don’t think he should be disadvantaged purely as someone helped his mum to apply for a school and bursary.

@QueeniesCroft

It sounds like a classic case of equality feeling like oppression when someone previously had privilege. I don't for one moment believe that independent schools are being discriminated against, but I do believe that the extra "weight" that was previously added to an application by going to a "good" (ie private) school is lessening.

This.

This is something I worry about for my children, they’ll be attending boarding school as children of a soldier. They have had a disadvantaged education so far having moved every 2/3 years. I’m worried that if a cap is out on applicants from private schools they’ll be disadvantaged. It’s a long way off but not everybody at private school comes from a hugely privileged background.

To be fair most of the private school kids my DD has encountered at a Russell group uni and entitled arseholes. Seems most of the drug dens are run by them as well.

But as to being disadvantaged it’s bollocks 40% of kids at most top unis are from private schools. Still disproportionate high compared to the general population.

YANBU OP. And I say that as the parent of a kid in private school.

I never came into contact with drugs at all until I got in with the public school set at university. None at my rural comp - that I was aware of anyway!

@Runforthehillocks

I have it on good authority that universities have begun to realise that they're not always getting the brightest by picking those with the highest grades, hence the move towards contextual offers. It's not all altruism on the part of the unis - they're genuinely hoping to increase the quality of their intake, and I'm not talking about lineage.

That’s true - but being good at exams is a requirement of universities like Oxbridge because of the sheer workload. I remember one of our graduates telling me how her final exams counted for 50% of her entire grade.

Not to mention the condensed terms…

Rizzoli123, that post smacks of elitism, your 'quite bright' kid (or kids, your post is not that clear), would also thrive in a state school environment, primarily because they're bright

@HarrietsChariot

It's one of those situations where trying to "level the playing field" makes things unfair. Like usual, there's a straightforward and fair solution - give the university offers and places to the students who get the best results, regardless of whether they were at a private or state school.

I faced this discrimination myself as it happens, when I was applying to six universities for offers I got five fair offers back and a rejection. The rejection was from the uni that I'd been warned not to bother with because they didn't like taking people from my type of school. (Won't say the university's name but I think the town it was in used to be called Snottingham.)

My belief has always been "equality through equality" - you don't get equality through discrimination.

But there is no equality between independent schools and state schools for the most part. It is much much harder to achieve the excellent outcomes an independent school churns out if you attend a state school. I have worked in both state and independent schools and have seen the difference for myself. Not to mention the socioeconomic disparity that feeds into how and what students learn. Universities are committing to a fairer demographic and that is only a good thing. I was educated at an independent school and have no axe to grind, it's just only right that the balance is redressed

Absolutely

As an 18 year old arriving at Oxford from a very socially-deprived town, I probably benefitted from some of the weighting that we're talking about. And certainly, as a student, spending huge chunks of my vacations working on the university access program, and throughout most of my twenties, I had a fairly simplistic view: that private schools were evil, and state school were virtuous. I mean, it was an internal view - I didn't say that out loud, but I definitely thought it.

In my 40s, I have a slightly different view. Now I've had my own kids, I see that in fact, I wasn't a "guttersnipe". I was the child of two very involved teachers, with an ex-teacher grandmother living a few doors away. Between them, they taught me to read fluently before I started school, and spent hours every evening driving us to music lessons and sports practices. Almost all of their weekends and holidays were taken up with sitting in churches whilst my sister and I sang at various choral events. They paid for any tutoring I wanted. We went to the theatre and museums regularly and spent the long school holidays going around France in our caravan, visiting every historical monument they could find. None of this was captured in my Oxford application. To them, with my working-class accent and coming from an FE college that rarely sent anyone to Oxbridge, I probably was a "guttersnipe". I now see that I was incredibly privileged - certainly more than the kids who'd grown up in care or with addict parents, and probably more so than some kids from private schools whose parents lived abroad, or who were unable to give them such huge amounts of attention or encouragement, for a whole variety of reasons.

We can make population-level generalisations about some of these things, of course. However, I would say that in my time at Oxford, and amongst my social group, most of whom are Oxbridge graduates, it is relatively unusual to have got into Oxbridge without absolutely massive amounts of support - whether that be from a school or from an encouraging family. Now I think about it, almost all my state-school educated friends at college were the children of teachers. If we are saying that Oxbridge offers should take into account the privileges that applicants have received, then I think that's absolutely fair enough. But to follow that argument to its logical conclusion, applicants would also have to declare and have held against them, for example:

• whether they had received any extra educational tutoring at any point in the past
• whether the sporting and musical achievements on their interesting personal statements were facilitated by someone driving them to and fro on dark winter nights and buying them expensive equipment
• whether their families had spent money moving into the catchment area of a good school in a way that wouldn't be accessible to a low-income household
• levels of maternal education, as I understand that that's a huge factor in educational success.

It's easy to make private schools the pantomime villains here. However, there are different kinds of privilege. And by dint of the fact that they are on this thread, previous posters have shown that they are almost definitely going to be the kind of involved, supportive parents I have talked about above. I imagine you are all (as am I - I'm not knocking this!) taking your kids to piano lessons and rugby clubs. I am guessing that you are all reading with and to your kids every night. Perhaps the real Oxbridge weighting system should be aimed at the kids whose parents have not driven them to underwater basket weaving classes tonight, and who haven't read to them, ever. It would be interesting (genuinely - I'm not being sarcastic here, I really want to know) how many of us would still be keen on the weighting system if our own kids' privilege was taken into account and held against them.

@BFrazzled

From personal statement and teacher recommendation letter.

So either the student or teacher would have to think to specifically mention it? Is a teacher recommendation letter a standard part of the process now?

Only in Britain would people be gloating that unquestionably bright children who have passed highly selective entrance exams (beating contemporaries both from the private and state sectors) should be turned away from seats of learning on the basis their parents paid for their schooling.

Many of these private-school-pupil-as-victim type posts to choose from but I picked this one.

What some don't seem to understand is that Oxford and Cambridge are looking for a particular kind of very bright and committed student. They realised that many good prospective students were not applying, and that many of those who were applying were not getting in because they were disadvantaged by the application process.

So they changed their process and did some work on encouraging people to apply. Shock horror - some of them turned out to be exactly what Oxford and Cambridge were looking for.

All that's happened is that more state school students are applying and some of them are better candidates than some of the private school students who would have been offered a place a few years ago. If a state school student is offered a place ahead of a private school student, it's because the university thinks they're better and wants them more, simple as that. Being bright and privately educated is not enough any more. And quite right too.

It’s all really interesting.

I’m looking forward to seeing what this does to private schools in the medium run. It was always the mediocre Independent schools that had to fight to survive. This new stance from elite universities undercuts the famous, well regarded, academic private schools, not the middling schools with average pupils. Why fight to get your child into an Uber-selective school where the whole cohort will be clever, if it only means that university admissions tutors will be judging your child’s grades against the rest of the class? There are more flattering class populations to set your child in.

It will change the character of the universities too. Perhaps the elite schools will seem less elite once there are more “regular people.” Perhaps they will actually be less academically elite. Picking students with the best a-levels who were already polished is a lot easier than trying to guess who has aptitude and would have been likely have made top grades if they had been in a different situation. It’s riskier to select on aptitude than it is on achievement.

I find it rather entertaining tbh to see all the irate private school parents who have made a deliberate choice to try and purchase privilege for their children feeling so incredibly hard done by when universities choose to try and look beyond that privilege.

It isn't as if all kids from all state schools get contextual offers. We are talking about a relatively small number of the most disadvantaged students. Yes, the method for identifying these students is less than perfect, but it's better than nothing. The system is still hugely stacked against these kids overall, so the rest of us need to stop bloody whingeing. Despite the sense of entitlement that some parents may have, the children who are privately educated are not the disadvantaged ones.

@Empressofthemundane another view could be that if said achievement is based on having being spoon fed in an environment that is totally geared up for achieving top grades, that could be more of a gamble than on someone who has come close to those grades in a much more challenging academic environment.