To be pleased most of the cabinet are Oxbridge graduates?

[sagerosemaryandthyme]

That's it really. Surely we want the brightest and best in the cabinet.

Oxbridge is open to all with the motivation to apply. I didn't get into Oxford (from my private school) but lots f state school friends did. Going to Eton doesn't guarantee entrance to Oxbridge. The fact that Cameron went to Oxford gives me more faith in him. Eton is money (or a scholarship - not all infinitely loaded but most very well off of course) but university requires more than that.

"Oxbridge is open to all with the motivation to apply"

And the knowledge and skills to find out how to go about it. If you go to a school or come from a family where going to Oxbridge or its equivalent is the norm, then it will be much easier for you than if you come from a family or go to a school where it isn't.

No-one in my family had been to university before me. Only my mum had ever sat an exam.

Part of being motivated to apply is finding out that sort of thing for yourself if it's not immediately obvious. If by 16 you're still waiting for your family or your school to take the initiative you're already less likely to be a leader of any success. A friend is an example. Oxford 2:1, first from her state school to go and no-one else in her family went to uni before or since. Now a leading barrister.

Schools should give children self-belief and determination. Why isn't EVERY school in Britain convincing its students that hard work and independent thinking will give them a chance of success. It's probably Thatcher's fault.

"Surely we want the brightest and best in the cabinet."

Good point.

The great thing is that thanks to New Labour's inspirational introduction of the very marvellous and oh so progressive tuition fees now we can be sure that only the poshest and richest of the brightest and best will be able to afford to go there.

irony can be a beautiful thing. non?

Actually I had a trainee, when I was still a practicing solicitor, who was Harrow and Oxbridge - thick as pig s**t

you know what? it doesnt matter what any of the cabinet were doing, as long as they have some experience in their field and do a BLOODY GOOD JOB.

i dont care if our minister for defence is a 12 year old who's only experience of war is playing Call Of Duty, if he does a good job and sorts out this mess we're in, he's alright to me.

anyone got a 12 year old who's up for the job?

A lot of the anti-Oxbridge stuff in the leftist media is ironic given that a high proportion of them are Oxbridge and private school educated themselves...

............and given that the people most likely to lap it up and be put off applying are those that the leftist media argues are being excluded.

To answer the OP, in government I want people capable of critical thought, understanding complex issues and balancing competing interests. That's it. I don't really care where a cabinet minister went to Uni, or indeed, if they went, providing they can do the job. I don't judge people by background. None of us, rich or poor, choose the circumstances of our birth.

I do appreciate that going to Oxbridge was a privilege, but it was one that I earned, on my academic merit, from my state school background. Other than quality of degree, and a new appreciation of the range of career possibilities, the myth that Oxbridge sets you up for life based on some mysterious alumni network is just that.

Going back to the OP -

'we want the brightest and best in the cabinet'

Well of course we/I do. I totally agree with that bit.

BUT - and it is a big BUT - I cannot agree that Oxbridge grads are either the brightest or the best. Obviously they have to be pretty bright to get in and to get their degrees, but there are plenty of other really bright people who have chosen, or been forced onto, a different path. I find the use of the word BEST more concerning. Do you mean that they are better people than the rest of us poor mortals, who were either born not so bright or who chose to use our brains and talents in other ways, perhaps even working in poorly paid but worthwhile jobs rather than persuing personal ambitions? Or do you mean the BEST in the sense of 'top of the class' or 'cream of the crop'.

As we are discussing the political sphere, I cannot fathom why a cabinet of people who all have similar educational backgrounds, an avid interest in politics from a young age and sufficient financial backup to obviate the necessity to earn a living into their early/mid twenties, have, collectively the breadth of experience and knowledge required to govern successfully. Surely, a cabinet with a mix of previous experience from poverty to riches, from academia to business to farming to shop floor, from far rural to urban and yes, male and female would be much the BEST for the country.

Watching the debates and interviews in the run up to the Election I was struck by the similarity in manner, dress, haircuts and presentation of the leaders and other top men. Regardless of party, they all appear to model themselves on Tony Blair/Bill Clinton right down to 'happily married with young children'. I do not want the country to be run by a bunch of highly educated clones. I want to see diversity in the cabinet and truely the BEST people from all walks of life.

YABVVVVU.

I happen to be very bright by the way. When I came to the UK for a PG, I was accepted into Cambridge, LSE and Manchester. I opted to go to Manchester because it gave me the best funding.

Does that mean I would not be bright enough to be an MP?

And just for the record, smaller universities all over the UK are producing tons better research than Oxbridge and being in Oxbridge is not necessarily an indication fo brightness.

My DP is an oxbridge grad. He's working class BTW and is incredibly bright. Some of his uni mates are vair posh - but also very, very bright.

Once you are in the oxbridge system you are worked incredibly hard. There is only one expectation and that's excellence.

I hate this reverse snobbery re oxbridge, and if you do manage to stay the course after getting into one of the most rigorous academic systems in the world why the hell shouldn't you expect to go for the most prestigious jobs?

My understanding is that the Cabinet has always been dominated by people who have been to Oxbridge. So I don't think that there has been any change, or that this is something to particularly talk about as interesting for this new Cabinet. Likewise with private education, except for the period when grammar schools were more widespread. I think this is true across the house actually, I don't think it has ever been particularly representative. There used to be the group sponsored by the unions who brought a very different experience to play, and the Tories used to be much more tightly tied into business.

I agree with the comments of others about the very limited experience of some of the new Tories, although I think this was true of Labour too. I do think it worrying how many come from very similar backgrounds, just because diversity is very good when making really important decisions - you can get a real groupthink thing going on when everyone has a similar view point, and there is not enough challenge going on.

As to whether Oxbridge is elitist, well of course it is, they market themselves very hard as the premier universities in the UK, and have always been held up as the best. Not always true as in some courses there are much better alternatives. When I was making my choices the understanding was that Cambridge was for the genuinely very very bright, and Oxford was for those with the gift of the gab. In that way Cambridge was harder for everyone, and Oxford harder for the less confident. At my public school it was Oxford that attracted most people, and where the school spent a lot of time on coaching, both for the exam and the interview.

Given that both universities put so much effort into trying to attract from the state sector, and yet still are predominantly filled by those with private school backgrounds I really don't think that it can be said there is a level playing field - the private school children should be the very small minority (7% or so).

Josephineclaire and Hatesponge. I take your point, it is more about their privaliged background rather than the university they went to. Also Hatesponge, I didnt mean that they dont/wouldnt use surestart or the NHS more so that if they are not as dependant on them as others, and maybe wouldnt see how even small cuts to these services would be very damaging to people who rely on them.

Unfortunatly there is a stigma attached to Oxbridge on both sides of the fence. I have a friend who has a daughter and son who both were encouraged to apply to Oxbridge on there UCAS form from school. They were both accepted but turned down the place because they wanted to be closer to home. Both have got first class degrees and Masters.

When friends daughter applied for a post in the south of the country, she was told at interview that she was unlikly to be successful as they prefared Oxbridge graduates. She went to Liverpool, which is a red brick university and has a very good reputation of having high standards.

Reading this post with amusement......just wondering, why is it deemed ok to assume that everyone from a priviledged background ( I.e private school education, successful parents) is a braying idiot? It's not these kids faults that their parents have worked hard and made sacrifices to pay for their education- I don't get how this is universally deemed to be a sure fire way of turning them into a "thick toff"...

I doubt that DC's or George Osborne's parents had to go without to send their children private...

I think you've misread the thread lump - I'm objecting to a Cabinet full of privately-educated white male career politicians because it is narrow and unrepresentative of the population at large.

I also cannot see how a group who have never had to struggle for anything in their lives (a generalisation i know) or even really worked for a living can have the necessary experience to deal with departments such as Justice, Home, Work & Pensions, Health etc etc.

I would be unhappy with any cabinet that was exclusively drawn from a very narrow sector of society.

As is so often quoted on here, only 7% of the population are privately educated. A Cabinet in which 90% ish are privately educated is obviously unbalanced. As is one which has very few women, one person from an ethnic minority background...

I'm late to this, and much of what I want to say repeats things that have already been said, and it's not a response to the OP but to some of the subsequent comments. But I want to post because I feel very strongly about it.

I'm a tutor at Oxford and have been involved in undergrad admissions for ten years. It makes me very sad indeed to see that it is still apparently (widely?) believed that we take into consideration anything other than academic potential for admission. We assess applicants using a range of means, including school results adjusted according to average performance at the school, interview, written work, personal statement, teachers' reports, and aptitude tests. We do not really care about extra-curricular activities if they are unrelated to your academic work (sport, music, dance ... etc) except insofar as they might be an indicator of commitment, drive and intellectual curiosity (they often are). Neither do we select on grounds of personal likes/dislikes, regardless of the fact that we will probably come into a lot of contact with the successful applicants over their undergraduate careers (I must say it would be very difficult to decide in the midst of the interview process whether one actually liked a nervous 17-year-old or not: we tend to focus on other concerns). We are well aware of the advantages offered by particular social and educational backgrounds and we do our best to account for these in our assessment of the potential of each applicant. Trust me, we can see through a very great deal of the training for exams and interviews that the independent sector often offer their pupils.

Furthermore it greatly saddens me that graduates of Oxbridge often perpetuate the idea that they got in because of their ability to bullshit in the interview, or somehow fool the tutors into thinking that they were more academically apt than in fact they were. I rather wish you would have more confidence in yourselves: the very likely chance is that you got in not because of your bullshit, but because despite it we saw academic potential in you. We are not usually so unkind as to point out in interviews that we know you are winging it.

Do we always get it right? Of course not. We don't have as many places as there are brilliant young people, for one thing. But we work very, very hard to make it as fair as possible.

And yet we still have a deeply unrepresentative undergraduate population. There is no single cause of this, but the biggest by far is the nature of our application. And the myths perpetuated by many perfectly well-meaning people, as well as by an often-gleeful press, are a very important reason why we have such an unbalanced application. I wish that would change.

hear hear aquavit.

Yep it's great, glad they kept out most of the women too.
Over emotional and unbalanced, the lot of them!

What happened to the discussion of rubbish Oxford nightspots?!

I agree largely with what you are saying aquavit, particularly regarding the tendency of the press and Oxbridge graduates to perpetuate some of the myths around oxbridge entrance.

However, it is inevitable with an interview system that there will be variations and I'm afraid that the professionalism of tutors during interviews just does vary widely so it's very easy to see how these stories arise. I had five interviews over three days which meant the more eccentric encounters were balanced out by more rigorous testing - but it's only the eccentric encounters that make good anecdotes.

BTW - I'm impressed to see Areopagitica cited as favourite reading! I love that period.

Aquavit - GREAT post. I find it incredibly insulting (having gone to private school and then oxbridge and had a very "privileged" background) that people assume that, becasue of my background, academic sucess has been somehow easy.

I have worked and studied pretty much every day since I was about 12 (and now, being a barrister, I still have to study every day - but at least I now get paid for it!!). Did I have to? No, of course not. The vast majority of people from my school did not go to oxbridge. They simply did not work hard enough and did not do well enough in exams. I happened to like studying and decided (yes, decided, even as a teenager with heaps of other things to do in the evenings etc) to work hard to acheive a certain goal.

Obviously, there are plenty of people with similar drive, determination and talent who don't happen to go to oxbridge, who choose to go to another uni or who decide not to go to uni at all. Of course no-one is saying that oxbridge has the monopoly on the "brightest and best".

BUT, it is true to say that the majority of people who go to oxbridge and do well there have had to be driven and hard working and consistent. No amount of money or private schooling or "privileged" background can get round that. No-one buys their way into oxbridge for goodness sake!

Yes, the way the school system works in this country (which is frankly a disgrace) means that you probably have to work even harder to get to oxbridge from a state school. I could write about that for hours (my DH is deputy head of a state school in central London)... But that does not negate the fact that you have to work bloody hard even if you come from a private school.

OP's post was, I think, intended to spark a debate, but I agree with OP in that I am pleased that the fact that some of the cabinet went to oxbridge indicates that they are hard working, driven, consistent etc etc. That is NOT to say that no-one else in the world can be those things, of course.

I find some of the comments on this thread a terrible case of inverse snobbery...

God, who cares? There are a great many bright and educated people who attended Oxbridge and a great many who attended other institutions. I lay no claim to being bright, but I am educated, and have attended (so far ) three institutions of higher larning including - shock, horror! - a poly. I have found I did most of my own learning wherever I happened to be. Independence of thought and creativity are not necessarily taught, nor does exposure to even the best of minds guarantee academic fulfilment... and that's before you apply that to the real world problem-solving skills required by a Cabinet minister, especially in the current economic climate.

sorry staranise I also meant to say lol to Filth, I have never been anywhere quite so ... sticky (apart perhaps from the back room at the Bully but that is a more recent venture - Cowley Rd was a bit scary when I was an undergrad)

legally I wish I could believe it was as simple as inverted snobbery: but I think that there is genuine anxiety among many many pupils, parents, and teachers about what the Oxbridge application process constitutes and whom it might favour, and we need to address that.

Totally agree aquavit. One of the things my DH works very hard on at his inner London state school is raising the kids' expectations of what they can acheive. Many of them think that oxbridge (actually uni generally) is not open to people like them. When they are asked to think about what jobs they would like to do, they often say that they doubt they will have a job. And these are children who are often more than capable of acheiving academic success.... but they don't as they have very little encouragement, especially at home. Changing that needs to start really early on, from as early as primary school.