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.

OK, now I haven't read all 8 pages here, but is anyone who knows the area that surprised by this? In the last measurement available (AFAIK) Knowsley was the 3rd most deprived borough in the country. They have redone a lot of their secondary schools in the past few years but that will take some time to have an effect. The kids in the area are massively disadvantaged. Of course the brighest should get a shot at Oxbridge and many more should be going to university but I am not at all surprised at the current state of affairs.

Up thread somebody said that an A was the top 5%. Would that it were so. In last years A levels in chemistry, 53% of students got A or A
which means that an a grade student is just average among those who took the exam.

the RG is indeed an artificial construct.
BUT it is getting more real by the day and enforcing academic rigour and dropping the more 'mickey mouse' courses
(look at Southampton Solent's clearing list and see why some degrees should never have been)
which when we are competing on a global stage is a GOOD THING

and making all schools and LEAs justify the outcomes for their children is a GOOD THING

but the point about popular subjects is that they're popular isn't it

I'm not disagreeing - and you best know the requirements of your local RG - but Leeds and Manchester are offering lower than three As for popular subjects. And you can lower that further by applying for, for example, English and Sociology. A student was offered 36 IB points for Anthropology at Durham this year - not a huge ask for a university towards the top of the tables.

As regards Medicine and Vet Science, they are a different story and I'd expect the highest achievers only to try for them - and to a lesser extent, Law and Dentistry. They have always been very demanding.

I don't mean to dismiss the idea that admissions are competitive, but capable young people are still doing well. There is a problem at the lower end of the socio-economic scale, (and I mean those in deprived circumstances with limited or no choice and tough family circumstances) but despite some annoyance about schools and teachers, the problem is a wider societal one and its reality in the classroom hard to explain to someone who hasn't worked in a school in a difficult area. I think I might be contradicting someone higher up the thread but if the parents aren't subscribed, or at the very least not actively discouraging children (explicitly or by adding problems to a child's life) it is a really uphill struggle to get decent results for students.

Don't confuse A and A. For A you have to have an A overall and achieve 90%+ in both A Level units. It was originally intended to be the top 5% of students but it looks like it may be averaging at just over 7%. That is still a meaningful measure though isn't it?

It would be significantly fewer students who achieved A* in 2 or more A Levels.

I'm not a statistician but if universities were really interested in getting the highest achieveres they could demand A* in all three A Levels and they would be creaming off the top 2 or 3% of performers.

'and making all schools and LEAs justify the outcomes for their children is a GOOD THING'

Well, maybe, but I'm not sure that the number of kids who are getting into a total of 20 universities is the most important measure of an LEA's success.

It just strikes me as a bit of a waste of time to spend so much time proving that highly selective, elitist universities are creaming off kids primarily from highly selective, elitist schools. No shit Sherlock.

The stats I looked at said 9% A and 25% A for Chemistry in 2011. Considering the 'extra' it takes to get A, these stas, (if correct) don't seem unreasonable to me>

I'm not sure that the number of kids who are getting into a total of 20 universities is the most important measure of an LEA's success.

Would agree with this.

Talkin are you referring to GCSE As or A Level? With individual subjects at GCSE far more than the top 5% achieve the grade but the average number of A required by a competitive department in a competitive university means that it may well filter the top 5% (the requirement perhaps being 7 A* as moderated, something like that).

At A Level the A grade is very hard to achieve. Once you get into candidates achieving multiple A it's currently only a tiny percent.

Don't disagree with any of that anotherteacher. I'm pretty sure Manchester and Leeds require AAA for English and an A/B grade profile at GCSE. Will check if I have time.

I dont think enough emphasis has been placed on the fact that 5 out of the 7 High Schools in Knowsley do not have any sixth form (if its still called that)

To me that sends the message that leaving education at 16 is the norm, and that A Levels (let alone University) are "not for the likes of you".

If this coincides with parental expectations it must be very difficult for a bright kid to overcome.

Yep. Manchester University says AAA or AAB is a typical offer including A in either English Literature or English Language and Literature at A Level. Interestingly, English Language is not a facilitating subject even for English. How could parents and students be expected to know that?

Re-introducing interviews for university entrance would help a lot. In fact the Oxford entrance tests may well give some of these students a door to nudge open, in a way some of the more rigid current entrance procedures at other 'top' universities don't.

No it wouldn't yellow. All the research says that interviews are more likely to lead to reinforce prejudices. That's why they've been largely abandoned. They certainly disadvantage kids from working class backgrounds who are likely to be less confident and may well have spent their school career learning how to hide their ability rather than showing it off. It's also widely proved that interviewers tend to select people like them however unconsciously.

They've been abandoned because of volume five, not prejudice on the part of academics attempting to seek genuine potential. Though what you say may well hold true in other worlds.

Interviews haven't been abandoned in all cases, the university where I work (not Oxbridge) certainly does them.

I agree interviews are probably not going to help with widening participation though, I can see how they would tend to favour applicants from certain backgrounds.

The no 6th form thing - it was the same for schools in my area, I think there just weren't enough students to justify a 6th form per school, instead there was an FE college that ran A-level courses for the more academic school leavers from multiple schools. I guess it does send a certain message, and it's another barrier to overcome. We did have careers advisors who could get the forms for you, help with your application, let you know about open days etc.

fivecandles.
I thinks it's really wrong of you to dismiss people's feelings they didn't fulfill their potential by comparing it to those who dreamt of being a professional footballer.
Children who are capable of going to a good university should be given the tools to do so. You can't shrug that off as casually as you have done. It does those kids a huge disservice.

So why then is Oxford more diverse than other universities if the interviewers simply go for stereotypical, confident, independent school types?

There is more pressure on Oxbridge to have widening participation than on other universities including RG partly because they're more under scrutiny.

Sorry, didn't mean to be dismissive thebest, but I think there is an undue importance attached to entrance to RG universities and Oxbridge. They represent only 20 universities so for every one person that gets in there will always be a huge amount of unhappy rejects. There is no way of avoiding that situation even if ALL the entrants came from state schools.

And I think there's no difference at all to your life chances in having gone to a RG university like Manchester compared to a good university like York or Durham ( I know they're joining the RG this year anyway).

I also think it's too easy to blame teachers, careers advisers, schools and LEAs for lack of widening participation instead of the institutions and systems and social structures which are actually the problem.

In fact, there is a huge amount of advice very easily accessible to students not least on the Internet and you've really got to wonder if a RG university is the right choice if a student lacks the initiative to access it.

What is less easy to access and insidious is the unspoken rules (i.e. the snob factor) and even those in the know have to be very careful about how to diseminate this information in a way that doesn't simply reinforce the prejudices.

Take my example of the student who wants to pursue law as a career and wants to do Law A Level. What if you work in a school or college which offers Law A Level? It really is tricky. If it's a student with a C/D profile you could argue it doesn't matter that much as that student is unlikely to make it into that profession anyway (but in that case maybe it's not in their interest to do Law at A Level?). If it's a student with a string of A* and As how do you tactfully explain that it may not be the best choice without incurring the wrath of your colleagues?

And, as I say, it's counter-intuitive anyway, why shouldn't Law at A Level be good preparation for a career in law?

thebest, I'm very influenced by my experience of students who have been badly advised in the other direction i.e. they've been mistakenly told not to pursue subjects that they enjoy and that they're good at because it will damage their chances of getting into Oxbridge or a top university when they're hitting Cs with the occasional B at GCSE. I'd say that having unrealistic expectations, often without the graft needed to succeed, is just as much of a problem if not more, than those students who underaspire.

One student springs to mind who took up an extraordinary amount of time from all her teachers (and those who didn't teach her) and careers advisers agonising about whether to do one subject which she felt she would most enjoy over another which she felt she wouldn't but felt, possibly with some reason, would be looked on less favourably by Oxbridge specifically. In the end she chose the subject she less wanted to do and got a Grade B so was completely out of the running anyway. Given everything I know about her ability and results, if she'd done the subject she most wanted to she would probably have got an A. Nobody could tell her what to do, that decision had to be hers but she was given huge amounts of information and talked through the advantages and disadvantages.

^Why might a high-ability kid from a working class family "not like the very traditional courses offered by Oxbridge and RG universities"?

Has someone told them they're not good enough? That people like them don't become doctors and engineers and managers?

Or is it their natural sense of rhythm that makes them choose media studies over engineering?^

No, generalising here, but those are the very degrees that high ability kids from working class families are more likely to choose. In preference to, say, Classic, English Literature and PPE. Not all medical schools are in the Russell Group and many, many engineering and business degrees are available from non-RG, including former polytechnics.

Sorry, I thought you had kids at private, Yellow, just have confused U with someone else.

The point is they, their parents and or teachers knew the system and how to play it.

That factor applies strongly to undergrad admissions to American Ivy League, too, they don't get the most talented undergrads necessarily, but the accepted kids nearly always have parents who understand how to play the system. Getting into Ivy League Grad School is a lot less competitive, as many point out about Obama.

I missed quotes out of my post above which was probably obvious. Also it was suggested I implied there is no point in children seeking to achieve. I certainly did not mean to suggest that. I thnk most people who are reasonably bright if they work very hard and smart can achieve what they want to and it is the low aspirations of women particularly on feminist and housewife threads which keeps a lot of women down - they say things like I am happy if my daughter is carer not a surgeon as we need carers. Well yes we need carers but that does not mean your own individual bright daughter should be pushed into something which will not challenge her intellectually. (She can always do a lot of caring as part of her Duke of Edinburgh award or voluntary work or spend the weekends looking after Granny if she's that keen on caring).

On getting into good universities our oldest three have just been through all that. I think you need to be quite tactical and understand the rules. If I at 15 could cycle some miles to a public library to read up on what people earned (as I wanted to buy an island when I grew up etc etc which I then did) I don't see why a bight teenager even from a poor home cannot do a few interent searches to learn that what their teacher is saying about all the dreadful ology A levels at their school is rubbish. I certainly think Gove is right to help teenagers know which GCSEs are good ones of course and nothing has stopped any state school teenager in the last 10 years going on the website of a local academic private or grammar school and looking at the A levels offered and picking from that list a they tend to be the best ones. Of course the average IQ is 100 and plenty of children are as thick as a plank however rich or poor mummy or daddy is and lots of children from the less academic private schools get rafts of Cs and some Ds and some don't get A levels.

The North South divide still interests me. I quoted 3 academic private schools in the NOrth in the top 70 of al schools for A levels. There are a good few state grammars on that list but all fro the South (and one Devon I think). So why is parental income leading to good A level grades then - that is the main N/S difference? If it is parental income which determines it then the more housewives goback to work and earn a fortune the better.

Xenia
Interestingly it is combined parental income (yay - I can stay doing yoga)
and the MOST dominant factor in children's success is the level of maternal academic qualifications (double yay - my BSc FCCA were worth it)

and I think its then feeding back through the fact that good jobs attract bright people who have bright kids and take good jobs etc etc

I'm going to do a data request to the Dfe asking about the number of children being educated outside their own home LEAs - I suspect it may highlight the weaknesses in each area's state and private provision rather well ....

Xenia, I'm surprised you find that surprising. The link between poverty and low academic achievement has been very well documented as has relative poverty in the north compared to the south and the gap on both fronts is widening.

Except, Xenia, you probably couldn't earn a fortune 'up north', doing what you do.