Contextual offers - good idea but don't seem quite fair?

[MrsKypp]

I think the idea is great and I totally support it.

However, the example of these two families I know well makes me wonder. I am calling them 'child' for clarity, although of course they are a bit old for that label.

Just to clarify, this is nothing to do with my own DC.

Family 1
Rent a very modest flat.
The Dad is a waiter and the Mum does unskilled part-time work.
Child went to local non-selective state school.

Family 2
Own outright house they live in: semi-detatched in nice area.
Own outright a buy-to-let they rent out in nearby nice town
Dad has a PhD from highly prestigious uni, Mum has 2 MSc from Russell Group Unis
Child went to local non-selective state school.

Family 1 lives very near Family 2, but 1 is just into a London borough, while 2 is just into Surrey.

The child from Family 2 was eligible for and was given an amazing contextual offer due to the school apparently not being great, although that child was happy and successful there. The child from Family 1 was not eligible for a contextual offer.

I'm hoping that this isn't typical of how contextual offers work.

It does become quite unfair when it's based entirely on a metric like POLAR (participation of local areas) quintiles. Even the Office for students, which developed POLAR and uses it for monitoring changes in participation of disadvantaged students, says it shouldn't be used on its own to define a student's widening-participation status. However, many universities ignore this and use the metric on its own because it doesn't require any additional tools to import data to applicant databases.

Have to sit on my hands a bit with posts like this, along with the state schools getting places at Cambridge threads.
My DD goes to a school that gets contextual offers, yes there are a mix of pupils, some coming from well off backgrounds, a lot that don't. But the comparison between our school and the local private school is phenomenal. DD had next to nothing over lockdowns, no zoom lessons, teachers who made themselves unavailable, random assessments with no notice - I could go on. When they are in school, lessons are constantly disrupted, little support, high teacher illness and turnover. Even a middle class kid with professional parents would struggle. Some A level subjects never get an A grade, one subject failed everybody. Quite frankly a child who comes out of a school like this with 3 A levels deserves any extra leg up.

Try people with a second home getting onto Oxford UNIQ programmes with a second home and professional parents based on postcodes ...