Nadim wading into Oxbrdige entrance debate

[mids2019]

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10793175/Thinktank-Oxbridge-discriminating-against-grammar-schools-unfairly-impact-black-pupils.html

DM article here so maybe a bit of bias and the article is a little confused.

I get the impression that our new education Secretary (who is a big fan of grammar schools) has started to notice the diversity policies explicitly stated by Oxbridge in its attempts to take in students from comprehensives/deprived backgrounds.

I noted his dislike of discrimination of any form and I am taking this as a warning to top universities not to engage in activity which may be perceived as positive discrimination.

I understand that if grammar schools seem to be a link to allowing ethnic minorities to gain Oxbrdige places this is a good thing however it would seem not many from grammar schools are truly deprived socially so the situation is complex.

Do you think the government should be involving itself with this vexed issue of leaving to HE leaders.

(I think Nadim's inbox maybe overflowing with a mail's from concerned grammar/independent school parents whose children may not have got their university of choice)

At primary level, only 7% of children are in independent schools, but by sixth form, this number has risen to just over 20%.

70-75% of applicants to Cambridge now are from the state sector and offer ratios are in line with this.

Thete will always been more applicants from selective schools, by the very nature of the cohorts. This is true whether they are selective independents or grammars - and there are more selective independents than grammars in the U.K.

OP, to your question about how people in the so called 'top independents' feel about WP initiatives ..., well, yes, I think people are fairly sanguine. The concerns are not about WP per se, more that it's a bit of a blunt instrument at the moment as so many factors can come into play that won't always be visible in an application. There have been slightly less offers I think in the last two years at the schools mind are in, but it's hard to know whether that's the impact of Covid (ie. Oxbridge making less offers all round to mitigate against grade inflation) or WP (ie. independent school applicants now need to fulfil higher criteria than before to be competitive). I guess the next few years will see a host of further measures and yes, contextualisation will probably be made along the lines of how selective a school is, rather than what sector it's in.

@panda55

Thank you for your answer.

I think it's noteworthy that 20% of 6th formers are in the private sector and given many of these schools are selective it may be quite reasonable for Oxbridge to have maybe 30-40% privately educated students.

Grade inflation I think has not made university admission easier (Oxbridge plus others) and it makes it harder to have transparent means of filtering candidates.

My thought on selective schooling and in particular very selective schooling is that by the time you get to sixth form in reality you may have vast majority displaying Oxbridge potential with appropriate grade profiles. It would then seem a bit of a lottery for successful applications and with the stated goal of reduction of private school pupils at Cambridge this adds an extra tension.

@titchy
Where are the stats that 80% of privately educated DC get the grades for Oxbridge? Some private schools do but plenty do not. Private schools have a spectrum of results.

The Vice Chancellor also said he thought grammar pupils should not make up the difference between lower numbers of independently educated pupils and the I crass they want from the state sector. He wants comp children irrespective of parental income, where the schools are and the schools track record of results. As many have pointed out in the last few days, this isn’t really about diversity. It’s about championing state comp schools.

I truly don’t think Oxbridge is what makes all private schools tick. They are diverse in terms of what they offer and what skills Dc get from going to one. Their usp is not Oxbridge, except on some rarified schools such as Winchester.

It was a random figure plucked out of thin air to illustrate a point (ie that state school teach the whole range of abilities, private a far higher achieving cohort).

That said, CAG average grade for private schools last year was A (comp avg B) https://amp.theguardian.com/education/2021/nov/04/a-was-average-a-level-grade-at-independent-schools-in-2021-dfe-data-shows

If 40% private grades were A star https://www.tes.com/magazine/news/secondary/levels-2021-rise-3x-more-private-schools then a sizeable majority (maybe not 80% but not that far off) must be achieving around the A star AA level - which would meet Ox base entry standards.

There are underlying shifts here which interesting. There is a lot to unpack here.

It seems that Oxbridge find their mission to be a Marxist drive for equal outcome Social Justice, rather than an Enlightenment style search for Truth. That is a sea change.

A consequence of contextual offers is to take the pressure off of the government and state bureaucracies to improve state education. The concern used to be, how do we make sure that all students are getting an excellent education that supports their potential? Now we are going to just wave students through with the tacit understanding that we just can’t be bothered to spend the money required to make state education “good enough.” We don’t want to spend the money and we don’t want to tackle reforms. So bright, poor DC will get to go to Oxbridge in greater numbers than before, but we are still going to deprive them of the education they deserve from reception to year 13. And we’ll consider that acceptable because they get to go to Oxbridge in the end, now.

I wonder where the desire for equal outcomes will end? Quotas for government jobs? Quotas for PAYE jobs at public companies. Quotas for the independent consultants hired by businesses? What should be the categories for these quotas? Sex? Gender? Race? Ethnicity? Class? Geography? This would lead to a lot of in-group / out-group politics and special pleading. Sounds like dystopia to me.

Most interesting will be to see what other good universities do. They seem to be following. Oxbridge is totemic, but only affect small numbers. If the top 30 universities take a similar approach, the impact would be far more noticeable. It could actually make an impact on the viability of some selective private schools.

We already do live in a fairly quota type world to some extent in some jobs. I suppose if Oxbridge started taking sixth formers who had potential but were not up it then the standards of the whole year group would go down (unless there were more in foundation years) employers would not want people from there and other universities not doing that would triumph when employers went forth to recruit. However I don't we are anywhere near that yet. It is very hard to get into Oxbridge from any sector and on the whole the system is still working okay.

I am not sure Beristol has followed (where 3 of mine went ). I think it led. It has a list of the bottom 40% of schools and if you are in those ones by design or bad luck then you get a contextual offer. It is a bit more complex than that but it is so . When I had to deliver some sports equipment to my son's contextual offer state school university friend near our house I was astounded to see the house was worth £3m and the family were so well off on so many levels but got the contextual place. However as my children got to go where they wanted it is not too bad and my son says the contextual offer people do fine at university anyway.

@EmpressoftheMundane , I so completely agree with you. Why are universities burdened with having to remedy the problems created by poor educational standards in some areas from Year R onwards? The top universities spend huge amounts of money and resources trying to find potential students to apply from ordinary comps in the most deprived areas but it doesn't translate into many offers compared with those from the leafy comps and grammar schools. Performing well at school requires parental and school support from a young age. Trying to "fix" this at 17/18 years is just too late.

The proportion of offers to applicants is currently more or less the same 19/20% for both Indies and State. So, no preference of one over the other. What HAS changed is that many more are actually applying from state school, which seems to suggest the outreach is working. So, it isn't a preference of one over the other, but a numbers game. In the past a higher percentage of those applying from Indies got offers, but there were also many more applying. Now 20% of any of those applying will get an offer, regardless of where they come from.

That is compelling data @BigWoollyJumpers

I wonder what the average A level grades are of each cohort broken out State, Private and Contextualised. (I’ve looked but cannot find it.)

For me, this would prove that state school kids aren’t getting an easy ride, and would also demonstrate the gap that we need to close earlier in disadvantaged children’s schooling.

@EmpressoftheMundane Here you are....

www.ox.ac.uk/about/facts-and-figures/admissions-statistics/undergraduate-students/current/school-type

Well, it was always predictable that when pressure was put on Oxford and Cambridge to widen participation that the wealthy and powerful, privately educated, didn’t really mean it. Shoulders were supposed to be shrugged and sad comments made about standards just being too low in the state sector, so even though trying sooo hard to get more state school students admitted, it couldn’t be helped that Oxford, Cambridge and Russell Group universities were still heavily dominated by private school students.

Now, instead of celebrating things heading in the right direction and steadily increasing state entries having no negative effect on overall standards of final degrees, we have the tortuous argument that the state applicants getting places are the wrong sort of state school student and are robbing more deserving privately educated students of their places. Oh, the horror! Privately educated students should only be robbed of places by genuinely poor people, but only if those people can get places without positive discrimination being applied (sad face, shoulder shrug - they simply aren’t good enough or well educated enough to get those places, are they, even though everyone is trying soo hard to help them…).

Basically, anything whatsoever that ultimately results in fewer students of the sort who used to get places at the more prestigious universities getting places now is going to be objectionable to those who previously benefited from the status quo. Unless strong evidence is provided of plummeting standards at the specific universities concerned, though, it really does come across as sour grapes, as clearly those that are getting the places are plenty good enough and therefore deserve them every bit as much as those who just missed out. The fact is, there are far, far more people capable of benefiting from an Oxbridge degree than there are places to take them all and no admission process is ever going to be perfect, but to admit the system used to be unfair then complain when anything is done to change it, despite no evidence of actual harm caused to standards by the changes, does not really come across well.

And the same argument applies to grammar schools as private schools - if the proportion of comprehensively educated students and ethnic minorities going to Oxford and Cambridge is actually going up and standards are not going down, why do you think the system is more unfair now than it was before? What evidence is there that it is less fair now than the system that was acknowledged to be unfair before? Or is the complaint really just that things have changed and you don’t like the change, because the old system advantaged you more?

Grammar schools do appear to have some advantage of their is an actual target for private school admissions along the lines of 25%. There will be 75% from state schools but as grammars are obviously selective and geared to teach with certain aspirations in mind a disproportionate number from this 75% will be from grammar schools (or at least selective schools). Does this exchange one form of inequality for another? The point has been made children attending grammar schools tend to be from more affluent families and have benefits from tuition to get there. In addition having high achieving cohorts is likely to facilitate learning without the requirement for teachers to actively teach to abroad spectrum of academic ability.

Nadim is definitely a fan of grammar schools and in fact future education policy looks like grammars leading academy chains in an attempt to spread their ethos. I would conclude that that there would be a dim view taken if universities were to be perceived as raising the bar for grammar school pupils.

the reduction of privately educated children does fundamentally address inclusive of those from truly deprived backgrounds and I think this a much more challenging issue.

Another point is that as 20% of 6th formers are privately educated then 20% of university entrants c an be assumed to be privately educated. Given private schools are often selective and historically (rightly or wrongly wrongly ) have pupils gaining above average A levels then In reality it would be expected that the average 'premium' university would have a proportion of privately educated children above 20%.

Will all RG universities adopt policies of reducing private school numbers and what ultimately would be the result of this? I actually think increasing state school numbers is a good thing but it should be achieved in a way that seems fair to all. We live in a democracy and parliament has never considered banning private schools (from both the left and right) and so I think independent of personal opinion treat the privately educated fairly in terms of H E entrance.

A statement from a VC from possibly the world's best university saying he 'expects the number of privately educated children attending to fall in future's to my mind does not seen very welcoming to the bright 17 year old attending a private school. Replace 'privately educated ' in the above statement with any other minority and obviously you would have an unacceptable discrimination so I do think people should be considerate of their wording.

Doesn't above

If 20% of UK students at Oxford and Cambridge were black, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that they were now over-represented, as they only make up 3% of the population, so no, not unacceptable discrimination to say that privately educated students are still actually over-represented and you expect their numbers to fall in the future if this is still actually the case. Obviously, if your child is privately educated, you will be far less likely to believe this to be the case, won’t you, and you will probably also have the (overweening) confidence to genuinely believe that you know better than Oxford and Cambridge and that the fault is with their admission procedures.

I don't think they are over-represented at Oxbridge if we go by 20% of sixthformers in fee paying schools and then add in a slight bias for those at state and private schools in the North to be more likely to pick Durham due to where it is just as my children picked Bristol over Durham (3 of my children that is) as we live in London so it was closer to do Bristol not Durham. I think it works out about fine - particularly looking look at the figures I quoted for London based on % applicants from the North etc etc.

On grammar schools we stopped having them around 1970 in NE England and been 100% comp (plus private schools) since then so it is a bit unfair that some parts of the UK have them and others don't. it should all be the same given you pay the same income tax rate in Newcastle compared with Bucks or Kent

Only on Mumsnet would so many posters cavalierly inflate the percentage of UK students educated privately at 6th form level to 20%, when the actual figure is closer to 15% than 20%.

The problem with this is it is such a broad brush approach. How do you compare the bright boy from a Carribean background whose parents didn't go to university and who lives on a rough South London council estate but who got a 100% bursary to a school like Christs Hospital or Whitgift with the child from an Asian family where both parents are doctors and live in one of the leafy suburbs south of Croydon who got into the grammar school in the same area? (Then again if the grammar school pupil was a boy he might be allowed to apply to Oxbridge but his equally clever sister might be required to stay in London for cultural reasons. It's not as far fetched as it sounds - I know a number of very bright girls commuting from Croydon to UCL as their family won't countenance them living away from home.)

There must be a better way of working out contextual offers than simply independent and state.

The recent Times article about Cambridge admissions said
"Private schools educate about 7 per cent of children. The proportion for sixth-formers is believed to be about 12 per cent. "

I don't know what the sources of these varying percentages are, but I'm wondering if there's a discrepancy because the higher estimates might include pupils in U.K. sixth forms who would be classified as overseas students for the purposes of uni admissions and hence not relevant to this specific subject.

UCL put it at 17% in 2019

UCL blog

The Times is notoriously anti private school, as evident by the articles published regularly ion Sundays every few months.

😂 at The Times’s “notorious” anti-private school stance. That sounds like Cambridges “notoriousanti-private school bias.” The figures I have read from various sources put private sixth form attendance at around 16-17% so I would say that’s the most commonly quoted level - closer to 15% than 20%.

It’s good the Oxford and Cambridge admissions processes do not use such a broad brush approach then, isn’t it.

One thing that is never mentioned in these discussions is the number of overseas students at Oxbridge . I realise that they are a huge source of income to the the universities but I was shocked at a Cambridge year 13 event to find how large the number is. At one college we were told that 10% of the intake is overseas. Now of course that does make for an interesting cohort but it also, in a place like Cambridge which accommodates all first years, means less places for home students. At another we were told that out of the annual intake of approximately 200 about 50 would be overseas and it was acknowledged by the speaker that these places were squewed to certain courses.

I expect I can find some FOI data on this but haven’t yet had time. Maybe this is not the issue it first appeared, and of course other universities, notably St Andrews also take a very high level of overseas students but seem to be more upfront about it .