Durham - deeply disappointed child - any admissions insight

[albertandlilylight]

First choice university by a mile and really really wants to go there and college system would suit very well. 43 (IB) in predicted grades, am told by school very good school reference and personal statement. However, got an offer for a course did not apply for and for which has no interest. Don't understand at all. Worked so hard all the way through school, told hard work rewards and then this. Anyone got any insight to how Durham are offering and is there anything that can be done from here?

Is that true? According the their website they would give DC (regular comp) a 'flag' so prioritised for a place but at the standard entry requirement.

I’d rather not say as there’s only a small number of universities which offer the course.

Edinburgh will flag an applicant from a 'deprived' background. This does not include most pupils from 'regular comps' like my own DS. He has an Edinburgh offer on his own merits.

See article below.

www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/edinburgh-university-quotas-for-students-from-deprived-backgrounds-are-reasonable-but-not-at-100-per-cent-cameron-wyllie-4013792

@FlorentinePaper do you not think other universities will follow Edinburgh? What ‘politics’? Interesting.

Actually.....everyone receives an offer "on their own merits".

I think there are two ‘levels’ of ‘contextual’ offer to think about.

One level is simply who you choose to give a standard offer to - so you can, to give a very crude example, give offers to those who meet a bar of 8s and 9s at GCSE from selective / private schools, a bar of 7s, 8s and 9s from non-selective state schools from good postcodes and a bar that includes a lower grade or two from non-selective poorly performing schools in deprived postcodes. The offer is the same for all, but they are not given to ‘all the highest performing students who applied’, rather to ‘students whose results are good from their context’. I believe Cambridge generally uses GCSE results in this type of way, for example.

A second level is where not only who gets the offer, but what the offer is, is contextual - so a candidate from high performing private school A gets a higher offer than a candidate from low-performing state school B. I believe that Bristol has tended to use this type of approach.

One of my kids went to Bristol and made friends with a girl with a contextual offer. She said that she and her friends thought contextual offers were great. As soon as they realised they didn’t need the top grades any more, they all relaxed and came out with lower grades than expected. But just enough to still get a place.

I'm talking about SNP politics that other posters have referenced. I have no clue what other Scottish universities will do but I don't think other universities south of the border will follow Edinburgh's lead at all. Bristol has 40% WP and that is considered to be high. As I understand it, this is nowhere near Edinburgh standards.

@AllTheDifference Bristol's WP schools list seems to have been tightened up a bit but looked very odd a couple of years back. A friend's DC has two parents who are city lawyers, they live in a house worth more than £2 million and went to a high-performing, extremely leafy stockbroker belt Surrey comp. To everyone's astonishment they and their equally affluent friends all got contextual offers from Bristol. It turned out that the school was on the Bristol contextual list. No DC in that school lives in a house worth less than around £1 million.

That’s insane!!

Why is it so hard to understand that 3 A stars in a failing comp is a very different achievement from achieving 3 A stars in a top selective

But still does potentially discriminate those from a top selective because they have no way to prove that they too would have got 3 A stars in a failing comp. They have achieved the top score and can do no more. It is saying ‘you only achieved because of your privilege’ which may not be the case but they have no way to prove that.

On nine courses no one without a flag were even considered however meritorious they might have been. There was no assessment of if a ‘plus flag’ students application had more merit than a student with no flags other than by ascribing overwhelming merit to the ‘plus flag’ criteria themselves.

@Shelefttheweb no it doesn't have to. It just means that top grades are a given in certain environments and you need to prove that you can do more than that. We had these talks at my DC's very selective schools. They were told on no uncertain terms that they needed to raise their game beyond top grades e.g.supra-curriculars if they wanted to compete with DC who got similarly impressive grades in a much less privileged environment. They had ample opportunity fora whole raft of supra-curriculars so why wouldn't they do them to add strength to their application?

Why are you highlighting postcode gamers and minimising the advantage of Private Tutor gamers? There are plenty of children, including those at fee paying and selective schools, who have tutors through GCSE, A Levels and Oxbridge entrance type exams. The advantages this may provide them in securing an offer should not be underestimated.

Contextual offers are not made to lower ability children, they are an acknowledgement of the fact that some children are at a significant disadvantage.

The contextual offers are also to counter things like social and time privileges - kids from poorer backgrounds at state schools might need to work at the weekends to earn money rather than volunteering at a hospital, or might not have the connections at a local law firm that a more privileged child might have access to. They can't necessarily afford to take a summer unpaid internship or (like another student on my program way back when) go to another country on a "help for humanity" type experience.

This stuff is incredibly hard to quantify. It may seem unfair, but students from privileged backgrounds need to be doing this stuff because they are able to. That's why just going on excellent grades is less fair for them.

A privileged student who spends a few weeks every summer volunteering at the hospital probably has a greater interest in being a doctor than another privileged student who just goes on holiday. It's impossible to go on that for the student who works in Greggs all summer because they need to save up for University. You can't judge their level of commitment because they had no choice to do an unpaid supracurricular.

Anyway, this will always be emotional and contentious. But when I think of all my friends at college who (like I did) had a job at the weekend as well as going to Sixth Form in the week, a contextual offer seems more than fair. I don't think I had one, mind you, because I was offered a place at/higher than the grades previously specified. I don't know if they did contextual offers back in 2005.

Interestingly, Cambridge (who use context in the first way - to decide who to give a standard offer to) mainly give standard offers that are well within / lower than the predicted grades of their accepted candidates.

So ‘the grades typically necessary to succeed in the course’ are the standard offer, but rather than using this offer as a way of ‘selecting’ candidates on results day, the university has already selected who they want.

Many of the students that get contextual offers were not disadvantaged though. Postcodes for example are a bit of a blunt tool. Not having a parent with a degree doesn't necessarily mean you are disadvantaged either. Many health care professionals (e.g.nurses,) and other professionals who qualified in the 80s and 90s didn't go to university but they are still skilled and educated.

The question is, is it better to have a blunt tool that does generally help who you want to help (but also includes others who may not need it) or a very precise tool that helps a small minority if those who you want to help but definitely excludes those you don’t.

Particularly if the blunt tool is low effort / resource and the very precise tool is highly resource intensive, the blunt tool may well be preferred.

Why not wait till she gets the grades reapply for Sept 2024 & take a gap year.

Some courses are very competitive. I know people who have applied upto 12 times for my dental course and finally been accepted after 12 years!! If you want something bad enough you have to keep trying. Just because you work hard and get the grades doesn’t mean you are entitled to a place of your choosing. Hopefully they got some feedback so can work on those points to try again next year. Maybe have a gap year? Or obviously accept a different offer. Good luck!

There is occasional movement in durham in special cases, but this may be more tricky if the course is completely over subscribed. Durham does fantastic combined honours courses where students pick the modules they want across the different faculties. I would recommend talking to the coordinator of this (combined honours in social sciences). That way they can pick the best modules from the history course and mix with another subject of interest.

I would question how much it helps those that actually need it though if they have a fixed number of contextual places and they are taken by those that don't need it. It’s not fair on non-contextual students either if their peers are being treated more favourably because the universities have used low effort blunt tools so they can tick the right boxes.

@cantkeepawayforever at an ideological level I think it is much better to have WP, even if it has to be a bit blunter than it should be to be absolutely fair for resource reasons. It is never going to be absolutely perfect and the pendulum may need to swing a bit too far in the opposite direction before an equilibrium point is found. After all, it has been swinging substantially the other way for a very long time. However, at a practical level attention needs to be paid to how blunt it actually is. If it is too blunt, it compromises the integrity of respected universities if intakes are inadvertently dumbed down because the wrong people are getting in.

Contextual offer are bunt so therefore they go to students who aren't necessarily disadvantaged. Also if you need to the skills to achieve an A grade and are given a contextual offer which is lower (agreed a B and A grade in reality could be one mark) and don't have the skills you will struggle. A level is the same - students going to sixth forms where they are start studying say maths but have 6 due to the school they were at - agreed in another school they might have achieved a 8 realistically don't have the skills to join the A level at that point. They are along way off

The current blunt tool of postcodes excludes the majority they are seeking to help which is effectively making them further disadvantaged. It needs to be more precise than postcodes.

For example based all the Scottish Islands are excluded from Edinburgh’s postcode based contextual offers. Edinburgh also offers contextual offers to schools in its Leap programme but they are all around Edinburgh so not available to any in rest of Scotland or the Scottish Islands. The ability of rural students to access supracurricular activities is also severely limited. For example a friend’s child went to a workshop session put on by a university. Local students could go to the session after school, my friend’s son took the day off school to attend due to travel. But to come from the highlands or islands would have been several days of missed school and large expense. Yet rural areas hold families suffering high levels of deprivation.