Not one pupil in Knowsley went to Oxbridge last year and only 2% went to RG universities.

[thebestisyettocome]

In adjoining areas, Sefton and Halton, admission to Oxbridge was also 0%.

I'm really angry about this. No wonder people who can afford to send their children to private school.

Voles I'm not that daft.

I don't send my children private as a matter of fact. Eight @ even a modest £15,000 pa after tax would be quite a stretch. Boarding school would be twice that. They slum it I'm afraid.

I have reservations about this data but I'll look at it again.

Unless I've woken up in a drug induced parallel univse (it's possible, I'm on STRONG painkillers) Yellow certainly does not send her kids to private school. :)

I tried looking at this data last night on my phone (and on the painkillers) and wasn't able to make head nor tail of it. But one thing that does surprise me is that people are surprised that selective schools send more kids to RG and Oxbridge (I actually think RG is a bit of a fake construction, and the one thing I was able to ascertain from the data was that they are using the definition of RG as it stood for that year - ie they haven't adjusted for the new RG members, some of which are much more prestigious than some longstanding members)) than the non selective schools in their area.

Glad to have the support of someone far more numerate than me Metabilis :)

Now I'm even more dubious about the data - thought it was just me.

Yeah but you have to remember I've been ....compromised...by strong painkillers.

Surely the problems are complex and self perpetuating. Deprivation in the area and low educational attainment of parents leads to a higher chance of lower aspirations for the children and a lower chance of parental support. These in turn lead to falling standards in the schools with overall low aspirations which reinforces the poverty, low educational attainment of the next set of parents and so on.

The bits in bold are to highlight that I know this is a generalisation and does not apply to all parents. Almost all parents want the best for their children. There is some disagreement about what "the best" is, and there are some parents who are unable to provide the support and motivation for their children to do the best they can.

How do schools in Knowsley/Halton/Sefton/St Helen's actually do? What was the LA KS4 result? What percentage made the expected levels of progress between KS2 and KS4?
(I will look uo all these later but people in those areas may know)

Xenia, I agree with a lot of what you say but completely disagree about keeping aspirations low. We should be ensuring that all children and young people have all the choices open to them that their innate skills and intelligence allow, and that these are developed as best hey can be. They may then not choose to, say, go to Cambridge for very valid reasons. As long as they had all the choices that were open to them and had support in making the decisions throughout their life, I'd be happy. Raising aspirations for young people (and this is NOT the same as expecting X% to go to university) is the best way IMO to counter poverty, improve physical and mental health and also improve the lives of their children. The knock on effects on mortality, morbidity, crime and overall quality of life should not be underestimated.

Serial, I'm not sure that I understand your point or that you've understood where I'm coming from.

'If a working class kid is high ability, then they should have their choice of courses - both traditional and "courses that reflect the world in which we live and have changed their content and delivery in the last few decades".

Equally, these good modern courses should be attracting high ability middle class kids.'

Personally, I completely agree with this BUT the sad reality is that snobbery and the class system continues to be so influential in education in this country that more modern and progressive courses have less prestige than 'traditional' courses.

It SHOULD BE possible to tell students to choose subjects at GCSE and A Level on the basis of a) their interests b) their strengths and c) what will best prepare them for career intentions (probably in that order) BUT, in fact, a student who wants to be a lawyer is probably better off not studying law until after they've done a more academic degree.

This is counter-intuitive and if your parents weren't 'in the know' it would be very difficult for them to offer advice that would get their kids into RG universities given that top universities, whatever they tell you, select at least partly on the basis of elitism and snobbery.

It puts career advisers and teachers in a very difficult position. On the one hand, I sometimes get students with C and B grades at GCSE (who are therefore unlikely to get into a RG university let alone Oxbrdige) who say they want to pursue traditional subjects even though their interests and strengths lie elsewhere purely because they want to get into a RG university. On the other hand I get students with A/A* grades who do have a good chance of entrance to a RG university but they want to study law at A Level because they want to be lawyers for example or they want to do Performing Arts because they love it and are brilliant at it or they want to do Business because they want to be Business people.

It's very hard to tell them that they shouldn't do Business Studies even though they want to go into Business because it's looked down on if that's what they enjoy and are strong at. But, personally I would suggest more academic subjects if they presented me with a string of As and A*s.

However, the notion that there are hundreds of kids with potentially top grades at GCSE who are only excluded from RG universities and Oxbridge because they chose the wrong subjects is wrong.

The reality is that working class kids are unlikely statistically to get the top grades in the first place. Really to get into Oxbridge or a RG universities you need entirely A*/A with the odd B grade at GCSE and A Level and the majority of students meeting this profile are at independent schools.

That's changed so much. In the late 90s I got into one of the very good non-RG universities with 5A/A* and a handful of Bs (well obviously this was after A level, at which I got an A and Bs). I was one of the best in my year at GCSE - many people with similar grades will have gone to RG universities or even Oxbridge. Why have the requirements changed so much?

Grade inflation Stealth. The profile of undergrads at, say,Durham, has remained almost exactly the same in the past thirty years.

You see, now there's no point applying to Oxbridge unless you've got almost entirely an A*/A profile. It's pointless a C profile student getting his or her knickers in a twist about whether they're doing 'facilitating subjects' or not or whether they've got a strong extra-curricular record. A RG university will reject them without even looking at their application.

Bloody hell. So why? I though grade inflation was a myth and who does it benefit?

It isn't a myth. I suppose it benefits students who now get C where they might have got D a decade ago. It's not as much a problem for universities as the press and Gove would have you believe though because they can simply select students with A/A. A is the top 5% of students. If that's not good enough they could look at marks as they have access to this information.

The thing that I've never understood about grade inflation though is why OFQUAL doesn't just alter the grade boundaries to let less through rather than going on about the rigour of the exams themselves. My experience is that most of the exams are hard enough but you can get a C on less than half marks in some of them. It doesn't make sense.

I'm sure that holds true for Oxbridge but anecdotally dd (state school, deprived area) got RG/1994 group offers with a couple of As at GCSE and majority B grades.

But, as usual, it's teachers and examiners that get blamed for grade inflation even though we have no influence whatsoever on where the grade boundareis are set. So easy to put right.

I suppose one thing is that no Government has wanted to be responsible for deteriorating results which, presumably, is why they've gone up year on year. Now, Gove seems to be bucking that trend but I'm not sure he's thought through the consequences for his party let alone the students as ever.

No idea who the beneficiaries are. But the same quality of student who used to get the better end of a 2.2 is now coming away with a 2.1. The inflation hasn't stopped at school level.

Yes, saggar, exceptions could be made by some universities in schools where students have a strong profile in a school which typically churns out very poor results but they'd have to show real promise in Oxbridge tests etc and you'd still really need to be getting As and nothing less than B.

That's understandable Yellow. Now that students are paying so much for university education they're much more inclined to challenge anything less than 2:1.

That's another reason for grade inflation at A Level too. Any student can request their paper back and has access to the mark scheme so it's relatively easy to challenge results.

Examiners are not allowed to write 'rubbish' and give 0 now the student can read their comments. I think by and large that's a good thing by the way.

I think that for the lower half of RG univerisites, league table wise, the requirements aren't as high as that, unless for heavily subscribed subjects like Law or English. A student I know was offered AAB for law at Cardiff this year. Newcastle has achievable requirements. so does Aberdeen - not Russell group but a very good institution. The list goes on. The AAA requirements, to be fair, are for those institutions high in the tables and for popular subjects. The admissions tutors will look at a student with potential with less favoured subjects too.

I feel the league tables have altered things: in my day there was Oxbridge and then Durham and Bristol, but thereafter, a far less defined order of preference. League tables have concentrated applications in those institutions towards the top, increasing their popularity and the grades needed for entry. Except for what I perceive to be increased uncertainty about getting into a university in the top 5 or 6, for a popular subject, even with good grades, not much has changed in terms of admissions. I'm not sure whether other teachers and parents would agree?

But it is definitely more likely that a good state school student will apply to Oxbridge than it used to be and, I think, more likely that they will succeed in their application.

That's intertesting Stealth.
I also got 5 A grades and the rest Bs at GCSE is the early nineties which from the comp I went to should've been some indicator I was of sufficient ability to get into a RG university. As it happens, I got zero help choosing A levels and got no guidance or direction qnd didn"t get into an RG university. It saddens me that children are still going through this which is why I started this thread.
I did ok though as I got onto one of the toughest and most competetive degree courses (2:1) and did an MA at a 'plate glass' unversity and picked up a very prestigious scholarship along the way. I still feel a bit let down though and can't bear it that others are STILL being short-changed.

mmm.. but the point about popular subjects is that they're popular isn't it? Thing is that now students (esp working class students) are more likely to stay at home. In effect, this means that where I work there is one RG university that is travellable to and most of our top students apply there to do popular subjects. Courses like English, Psychology, Law, Medicine, Vet Science, Denistry are v v competitive and require an A grade profile.

I'm not sure how many young people themselves feel let down though thebest. An awful lot of students who talk about having been given the wrong advice, chosen wrong subjects etc would never have acheived the entry requirements for a RG university anyway. The nature of the system is that RG and Oxbridge only accept a minority and it's always going to be the creme de la creme at least on paper. Rightly or wrongly, these students are more likely to be found at schools which are themselves highly selective. Giving the odd student better advice is just tinkering round the edges. It's the system itself that excludes the majority of kids and that's its intention.

But, as I said earlier, there are more important issues in education than which university you go to. It's a Mumsnet obsession like that is not hugely relevant to most people.

I'm not sure I agree with you fivecandles. As I met people who'd been to Oxbridge and RG universities I realised that a lot of them weren"t actually the intellectual collosals I'd assumed they would be. In fact, a sizeable proprtion of them (I include the Oxbridge people too, and I have met a lot of them subsequently-some of them are even my best friends ) are pretty average. The point is they, their parents and or teachers knew the system and how to play it. It isn't correct to blindly assert as you have done that they are the creme de la creme.

Ok. I've reread you post. Perhaps you haven't blindly asserted but I still stand by the rest of my post. RG university degrees can be the difference between a job and unemplyment in today's climate so it's a bigger issue than a MINUTE obsession.

Mumsnet not minute.

Not a 'minute' obsession, a Mumsnet obsession.

The first and most important factor in whether a student gets into a RG university is whether they apply and then grades. The students who get into Oxbridge and a RG by and large have the best GCSE and A Level grades in the country.

There will always be people that are disappointed with their lot in life and there will always be those people who say 'I could have been a professional footballer if only....'

I agree that going to Oxbridge can open doors but then again if you're the sort of person that can get into Oxbridge probably most of those doors would have been open anyway.

I cannot see that it makes a blind bit of difference whether you have been to Manchester University (RG) or York (currently non RG).

But if you think it does why? Surely, it's just a matter of prestige rather than quality of the degree you would have got at a RG university.

About the same difference as it would make if you wore a dress with a designer label. Personally I'd rather wear the dress that looks nicest than the one with the label.