Despite having the right grades, my child is not applying to Oxbridge because ....

[TalkinPeace]

• she wants to live in self catered accommodation
• she does not like the small sizes of the colleges / social units
• having to go back to college for lunch while doing a lab based degree does not make sense
• the whole gown and formal dinner stuff smacks of coat tails rather than standing on own feet
• she does not fancy fighting through hordes of tourists while moving between buildings
• having a tutor picked by which college they are based in rather than their research specialism seems very odd to her

Also, for what she wants to do, the course at Oxford is not that well balanced
and Cambridge, despite having a fab course was not a place that felt like home when she visited for 2 days.

So she will be putting other Universities on her form and taking a great deal of stress out of this house.

For what its worth, those of her friends I've chatted to are also ruling out Oxbridge in favour of other Unis because of the first four points.

What are other people's reasons for ruling out Oxbridge, despite having the grades?

If anyone watched School Swap last night www.itv.com/itvplayer/school-swap-the-class-divide the state school head gave some interesting and thoughful views. She was trying to get at why many of the most successful people come from fee paying schools. She made all the obvious points about parents committed to education so much they are prepared to pay. The other obvious one was the relatively mediocre (academically) private school chosen which does so much better than the state school they swapped with take children from the top 25% at 11+ in terms of ability whereas in a cohort of 150 the state school said she would have 5 children only of that ability, a good few in the middle but absolutely loads who are very below average.

I haven't watched School Swap but the Head's comments have made me think. Would a relatively mediocre necessarily be taking children of the top 25% or is it more likely to be the top 40% or so? However, I would imagine that they won't be taking the bottom 25%, as most state comprehensives have to, so the comprehensives would still be at a disadvantage.

Any misbehaviour or failure to keep up and the private school can just boot the kids out. They can also avoid children with special needs.

Talkin - your dd sounds mature and sensible (although my experience of Oxbridge doesn't tally with some of the reasons given). She's right to think about where she'd be happy, where the course content will suit her etc.

BUT (and I know noone is going to like this), for some professions Oxbridge on your CV will guarantee a job interview for a candidate who wouldn't otherwise have been shortlisted.
It's wrong, elitist and demonstrative of how un-level the playing field still is.
But its also true.

I wouldn't have had the job ops I've had if I hadn't attended Oxbridge. I didn't particularly want to go either but in hindsight I'm glad I did.

Actually spinoa did not say that only selective independent schools could produce successful Oxbridge candidates! She said that currently these schools are more likely to do the things that lead to an offer in her area (maths).

Of course there are state schools that do these things (a selective school with a three year sixth form is actually very well placed to use year 11 to boost UMS at AS and engage in the other activities spinoa mentioned).

And there are applicants from very bog standard comps getting offers (a lad from my niece's school has just got his grades for Nat Sci - three A levels).

Obviously, selective independent schools will always have the resources and the will to do these things. However, I do think this is taken into account by Oxbridge in that there is no give whatsoever. Applicants from such schools will be expected to be flawless in terms of grades, pre-tests, and interviews.

I personally believe that it is at other universities where pupils from these schools get an easier ride, because the admissions process is largely clerical and those with high grades do well wherever they were schooled (there are obvious exceptions here before poster jump in).

Dd was so frustrated by the end of year 7 that dh ended up going in and speaking to the head. The straw that broke the camel's back was having to do a Facebook page for Richard III. Now, this could have been quite fun (Like: physiotherapy; Dislike: princes etc etc) but they had to just fill in from a basic sheet. I had a bit of a ruck on MN with someone who said that she should self-extend and set herself extra tasks in class yada yada, but honestly, what 11-year-old is going to do that? The other pupils would think they were an idiot and the teacher would brand them an arrogant creep.

I found the same in primary school (and I was a governor so had first-hand experience of some of the ethos) that many teachers think the idea is that everything should be "fun" and, moreover, "accessible" to all which in practice means aiming at the lowest common denominator. I have trotted out this anecdote many times on MN, but when I suggested humbly that they could listen to a more wide-ranging type of music going in to assembly/during lunch instead of Power FM old 90s, I was told acidly that children did not like classical (or folk/country etc) music and that many of the children could not "access" it . The head there was making the decision that the children were, what? - too chavvy? or at any rate certainly not posh enough for anything better than mediocre.

Meanwhile, there are other schools who are shovelling great spoonfuls of culture down their pupils' throats.

other schools which are... whoops.

rhoda there is huge resistance in the UK state system to the sort of changes that would improve standards, particularly for high ability children.

gosh spinoa I find it rather depressing that you feel 5 AS all in the low 90s is not good enough!

I didn't say this. I said that many candidates with 5 AS at A grade still get rejected for Nat Sci as it is so competitive. I think it has also been made quite clear that while there is often a UMS cutoff for getting an interview offers are not made solely on UMS scores i.e. once you get into interview you have the chance to shine and get an offer. However, realistically, somebody without AS UMS scores over 90 in several science subjects is unlikely to get an interview for Nat Sci, so doing fewer AS and getting higher UMS is a better strategy for getting an interview. As said above, I think it is also a better strategy from the perspective of having more time to go deeper into subjects too.

The OP's DD needs at least low 90s for the subjects which are As at AS to get an interview because her other 2 or 3 other subjects are Bs.

Sadly, spinoa seems to think that only the extremely well funded curriculum extension that can be provided in selective schools can produce the right stuff for Oxbridge.

Again I think the whole thread makes it clear that my views are actually completely the opposite. I would (and do) set a higher cutoff for AS/GCSE/UMS results for a student from a highly selective private school because of the advantages they have had. I would (and do) make allowances for less than optimal choices from students who have not been to selective schools.

However, this does not mean that the latter schools are not at fault for allowing students to make less than optimal choices, particularly when RG universities spend a lot of time talking to them about how to optimise the chances of getting into the most competitive courses. I genuinely do not understand why you are defending your DD's school/college for not improving her chances of getting more A*s at GCSE and high UMS scores at AS by cutting back on the number of subjects/dropping the MFL.

An admissions tutor might well look at the PS and grade profile and think that such a student had lots of potential, but they wouldn't be able to justify shortlisting them for interview when they had lots of other (state educated) applicants with higher GCSE and AS scores.

I have spent a lot of time (too much DH would say ) trying to figure out why so many are so resistant to change, why they unfailingly defend the state system in the UK. Even when it is clearly disadvantaging their own DC.

I've come up with a lot of theories.

I still don't understand.

But what I do know, is that the university system, and in particular Oxbridge (who get all the bloody flack) cannot be expected to right the wrongs and bridge the gaps. That's not our job.

BTW for the record I am very much in favour of universities dropping as many prerequisites as they can, to improve access and diversity. For example, it was recently proposed that physics and engineering courses should drop physics AS/A2 as a prerequisite (retaining maths).

But dropping prerequisites/automatic cutoffs on GCSE grades etc will not help much with the most competitive courses. There are so many strong applicants (state and private) that many of them will have to be rejected. The best one can do is to try and interview as many as possible, to try to judge who has the most potential, but realistically academics don't have the time to interview all applicants so they do have to do some preselection on prior achievement.

My current favourite theory for the strong resistance by UK state schools and teachers to raising their expectations of their pupils is fear/anxiety by the teachers themselves that they don't have the skills to do their part of the job. Several ongoing conversations over the past 8 years (not all of them very pleasant) have revealed this to be the case for several teachers and a few of their (better educated and more ambitious) younger colleagues have confided that this is an issue among their SLT.

Anecdotally, a childhood friend is HOD for MFL in a well-regarded (not top) provincial private school. She struggled hugely at school herself, had to retake her A-levels before gaining a place at a poor ranking poly and then did a PGCE and has worked her way up over 25 years. She is a real grafter but she wouldn't be able to raise her game in her subjects (French and Spanish) because she isn't very skilled at them. England's teacher workforce is poorly educated by European standards and this is a real barrier to raising standards. Individually, however, egos are protected by claiming the existing system is good and/or raising standards would be too hard on the DC.

MFL standards are poor in the UK.

We've been spoiled with native speakers (educated in their own countries) since primary. But I bet a few of these (fabulous) teachers wouldn't be allowed to teach in the state system because they don't have a PGCE (when anti-private school posters howl about unqualified teachers in the private system, I often wonder if they have any idea what they're missing out on!).

Maddy no, unfortunately not, to your question about contextualization. That and the funding issue as compared to independent super selectives are things no-one really ever thinks worth discussing. It's probably a bit first world to be fair, but I just put it out there because in university terms the high achieving grammars are very much lumped in with their much, much richer cousins, the high achieving selective independents, yet the grammars have to achieve on a shoestring, and the effect goes way beyond class sizes.

There's currently a thread in primary where the OP asks whether some subject specialists introduced at Primary level would improve standards...

Resounding rejection. What a surprise! Change = bad. Apparently a C in O level maths is perfectly adequate to teach your average able 10 year old.

Give. Me. Strength.

summerends I doubt any well led school enters pupils for exams they don't think have a value simply to garner 'points'. The fact that GS doesn't count for university entry doesn't mean it has no value, though I agree that in a crowded timetable it might well be the first thing to go.

I'm not sure one can compartmentalize the effects of funding quite as neatly as you suggest.

There's a balance to be struck with class size - in some independents class sizes are tiny, far too tiny for exchange of ideas, which is rubbish.

"There's currently a thread in primary where the OP asks whether some subject specialists introduced at Primary level would improve standards...

Resounding rejection. What a surprise! "

I have just read that thread, and the response is actually more subtle than that.

Basically the consensus seems to be that all see advantages of MFL, music and PE.

In KS1 (infants), the consensus seems to be for having a single 'class' teacher for these youngest children.

In KS2 (junior), the thread was much more in favour of specialist teachers, though there was a worry about 'compartmentalising', when so many schools do such excellent cross-curricular work e.g. teaching humanities through English and vice versa, or ICT in Science.

It's interesting, because certainly until recently, I taught my specialist subject (I have an Oxbridge science PhD) less well than I taught most other subjects. Teaching in primary is much less about detailed 'subject knowledge', and much more about pedagogy and about the teaching of skills. The explicit teaching of skills in Art, say, where I have to think about them consciously, came much more easily to me than teaching the skills of being a scientist, which are unconscious / implicit in me.

Even in Maths, the subject knowledge to teach an able 10 year old is well-contained in a Grade C O-level. A teacher with excellent teaching skills, with that Maths background, could teach maths to the able very well. Equally, the children who often need the most skilled Maths teaching are those who struggle. I have Maths up to first year degree level, and teach bottom set. My colleague who teaches the top set, has maths to GCSE only, but her teaching skills when teaching the very able are excellent.

It really isn't the case that 'high qualification in a subject' = 'able to teach it well to younger children'.

Sorry, posted too soon.

Until became a teacher, I would very much have gone along with the 'teaching = subject knowledge, which is best represented by formal qualifications' view. And I do think that by secondary, especially upper secondary, that holds true, because teaching at that level is much more about 'imparting specific subject knowledge' to pupils who already have the basic skills of eg. paying attention, reading, writing, doing basic maths, evaluating information, conducting scientific enquiries, using equipment, creating graphs and tables to show results, working with others in groups or pairs, structuring paragraphs in write ups etc etc (just thinking about Science there).

In primary, teaching is much more about 'establishing basic skills that can then be applied to / taught through an increasing mass of subject knowledge' - and that basic pedagogical skill is not necessarily correlated with specific subject knowledge / qualifications.

That holds just as true of the humanities teacher. By KS4 and overwhelmingly by KS5 teachers have to be able to challenge the most able in their particular school, as well as the less able, or they'll be doing those pupils a great disservice. At that stage their qualifications are vastly more pertinent.

How does all this work with the international bacc which seems to me to do everything that Oxbridge don't want? i.e lots of subjects in less depth?

Seems a bit unfair (although I realise fairness probably doesn't come into it) to knock an A level student who got a few less UMS because they loved four of their subjects and not knock an ibacc student who will have covered, what 5? 6? subjects.

Sorry, definitely last post - there are of course some teachers with grade Cs at O-level who would be terrible teachers for an able 10 year old.

But it is not a good correlation - many teachers with that qualification would be great at teaching said 10 year old, and many degree qualified mathematicians would be appalling at it....

(I am meaning 'ordinarily bright', not 'degree level at 11 bright' at maths, btw. Most teachers will only encounter 1 of the latter, or none, in their teaching lifetime, and any teacher who doesn't seek specialist input at that point is daft!)

Molio, absolutely I agree. By KS4 / 5 in every subject, subject qualification and expertise is of over-riding importance.

It is NOT important - or not of over-riding importance - in KS1 or 2, which is the point I was trying to make.

I'm completely with you on that too teacher, extrapolating purely from the varied experience of my own DC at primary level, where effective teacher doesn't in any way necessarily correlate with highly qualified teacher.

My DD had an English teacher last year (last year of primary) who had a (recent) English literature degree from a RG university, a PGCE and a few (3?) years PQ teaching experience in an English state primary school before moving to Paris and teaching 3-11 year olds in a bilingual school.

DD and her 10 classmates made huge progress with a teacher who could impart the full range of skills through literature and debate, to DC whose basic literacy in English was well embedded. Those DC had got to the stage where specialist teaching added masses of value.

Yes, Bobo - that end primary / start of secondary (so age 11ish) point is one where IMO, for children of average ability and above, specialist teaching is of benefit.

For low ability children - ie those who are still working at the level expected of, say, lower KS2 children when they start secondary - 'class teacher'-type teaching can still be of benefit to an older age, until those basic skills are really secure. I know of at least one secondary with a very challenging intake (large majority of Y7 intake at Level 3 or below) where shifting back to class-based teaching for Y7 and 8, with only a few specialists, provided a much better platform for good results in KS4.