Oxbridge: Blatant social engineering - not admission according to potential.

[Marchesman]

Despite resistance from some tutors, Cambridge University’s Access and Participation Plan 2020-21 to 2024-25 includes a target to increase the proportion of UK state sector students that is entirely separate and independent of aims for POLAR4 quintiles 1 and 2. Formulating admissions targets for the University of Cambridge’s Access and Participation Plan (2020-21 to 2024-25) | Cambridge Admissions Office

The university's own research in 2011 had "found no statistically significant differences in performance by school type, and there was no evidence of the phenomenon observed at other UK universities of state sector students outperforming their privately educated peers" https://www.cao.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.cao.cam.ac.uk/files/ar_gp_school_performance.pdf Subsequent data shows that students from independent schools performed better in examinations than students from state schools by 2015/16, at a level that is highly statistically significant: https://www.informationhub.admin.cam.ac.uk/university-profile/ug-examination-results/archive

Therefore, APP 2020-21 to 2024-25 makes no attempt to justify the state school target on the basis of student performance. In fact the only justification given is: "We recognise that school type is not a characteristic used by the OfS or contained within its Access and Participation dataset; we recognise too that the state versus independent binary masks a range of educational experiences…[however] each of the under-represented groups identified within this Plan appear in far greater numbers in state maintained schools, as do students from low income households who are not identified by any of the measures currently available to us."

The result of this can be seen in https://www.cao.cam.ac.uk/files/attainment_outcomes.pdf

In final degree examinations: "The per cent mark remained lower for the three secondary school types: • Comprehensive (estimate = -0.70, SE = 0.19, t = -3.63, p< 0.001); • State grammar (estimate = -0.98, SE = 0.19, t = -5.22, p< 0.001); • State other (estimate = -0.87, SE = 0.20, t = -4.32, p< 0.001)" To put this into context, these are the figures for students with "cognitive or learning difficulties (estimate = -0.88, SE = 0.33, t = -2.67, p< 0.01)"

Regarding the acquisition of a First: "The probability of the outcome remained lower for the three secondary school types: • Comprehensive (coefficient = -0.20, SE = 0.06, z = -3.13, p< 0.01); • State grammar (coefficient = -0.30, SE = 0.06, z = -4.81, p< 0.001); • State other (coefficient = -0.24, SE = 0.07, z = -3.57, p< 0.001)"

Selection according to potential? Really?

@goodbyestranger
Well I took your own comment about 'better people' also to be provocative, since that fits with your narrative. That independently schooled kids are 'better people' than their less privileged peers. I didn't understand you to mean that independent school in your eyes has to be bought to make your DC better people than they would otherwise be, since you can't or won't instil those same moral qualities at home (plenty manage in my experience; it's doable).

The last two questions are pretty much answered by omission. It sounds as though your eldest dipped his toe in a northern comp for a short while but didn't stay the course, and your bitterness is the product of your other two being around the age of uni entry and have either recently failed to get an offer from Oxbridge or you think that they are likely to fail.

Wrong on all counts, I am afraid. At least five generations of my family include spouses and/or siblings that have been educated in different sectors and my children are Oxbridge alumni. As I have said already, I have no skin in this game. If I were not doing the night-shift with an animal that requires company and having run out of watchable Netflix, I would probably not engage with a discussion that is largely incapable of moving beyond 'state schools good / independent schools bad', although it is entertaining to see the extraordinary level of bias here, regardless of what is empirically established.

Glad it’s all so entertaining for yousadly this isn’t just an academic debate for me unlike op my dds incredible Spanish teacher has just moved to the local private school (can’t blame her the admin she had to do in the state sector was awful). But it’s likely to affect dds A level grade (she’s lower 6th and our eldest so it’s all new to us). She lost both her excellent history and English teachers last term too to the private sector but is still expected to get all these A stars to do the course she wanted to do and will be competing against the private school cohort - who now basically have all the good teachers. But as long as it’s entertaining you I guess it’s all good.

So now that your three DC have left Oxford/ Cambridge I’m sure you won’t mind saying which subjects the three of them read? My rule has always been not to get specific about DC colleges until they’ve graduated then after that none of them cares. But I’m only curious about subjects, not colleges anyhow, so not identifying at all.

Nobody is actually arguing state schools are “good” though, @Marchesman - there would be far less need for contextualisation if all schools were “good.” State education is certainly far better than no education at all, though, but underfunded education harms everyone, including the privately educated who wish to insulate themselves from the problems of the rest of the society around them.

The objections are to your claim that privately educated students are “better people” and your justification for this being that this is down to sport, boarding and the influence of men from military backgrounds.

If I’d have known all the teachers were leaving I would have gone private frankly. Too late now and Dd is happy at the school (although stressed she said “I’m stuffed now mum”) when the last teacher left.

Goodbye stranger, you should try to avoid pressing other people to share details about their children's education. It looks very like stalking and it's really none of your business

Goodbye stranger, you should try to avoid pressing other people to share details about their children's education. It looks very like stalking and it's really none of your business

Thanks for the advice but in fact I couldn't care less about personal details. However, since OP seems extraordinarily chippy about what she insists is positive discrimination her DCs' educational context is fairly relevant in understanding what she's about. If I was a nosy parker I would have asked for detail. I haven't so cool down. Subjects read by three anonymous kids without adding in college or cohort - that's pretty sub par stalking on any measure.

I'm struggling slightly to buy the idea that OP's three DC were all at Oxbridge anyhow, purely and exclusively on the basis that if they've all graduated as she says they have, their collective experience of modern Oxbridge would have informed OP that her DCs' peers from the state sector were not likely to be the ones to show themselves in tutorials and generally as the relative dimwits in town.

@TheaBrandt - if you could have afforded private school then surely you can afford some tutoring on the side. You can’t blame teachers for leaving if the working conditions and expectations are too much for them to cope with. I have seen several teacher friends leave the state sector due to being on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

A large part of what private school parents pay for is actually a nicer working environment for the teachers there. I don’t think private school parents get an education for their DC that is 4x the value of a state education, far from it.

We chose state grammar and my DC have largely had an excellent education supplemented, where necessary by me or by using relevant websites/strategies. What made our grammar so excellent was the general expectations the parent group as a whole had for their own DC. The actual school is only ever part of the picture.

Calm down! Of course you care about personal details, you've asked for them in three separate posts. Do you realise that

1. If the children in question are adults, which they must be, then that information is not the OP's to give away, and
2. anecdotal evidence will not help your cause or grind your axe.

regardless of what is empirically established

🤪😂

Why does it matter if some schools are better than others? We live in a wonderful capitalist UK, the only political system that properly works and this is one of its features - you earn more and you have more money for schooling etc to give your children or whatever else you choose. This is good, moral and right. It works. It is how humans are made and it is in a sense why we are here.

Obviously left wing socialists won't like it, but not everyone agrees with them. Labour has not even won an election since 2005 as the people of the UK have more sense. Capitalism rules okay.

It creates an unequal
society.

Why should some children have a lesser education because their parents have no choice but to send them to a poorly performing school?

This government needs to get its act together to deliver high quality education for all.

I said I don’t blame the teachers at all. I blame a state system that doesn’t pay them enough and then asks that they do a ridiculous and pointless amount of admin on top of teaching - that’s what drove out the excellent Spanish teacher she was close to breakdown. Such a shame. Tutoring not really the same for a level especially for MFL and English the teacher is key. Hey ho.

oddandelsewhere I asked about schools once, repeated the question then asked about uni subjects. On the Higher Ed threads parents are always talking about their DC, pretty ridiculous for you to come over all data protection aware given the anonymity of the request. I'm not clear that I'm grinding any axe or indeed that I have an axe to grind. All eight of my kids went to Oxford and that's my lot. I'm chilled :)

“This government needs to get its act together to deliver high quality education for all.”

The curriculum in the state sector is challenging. The problem is the policing of teachers by the nanny state/Ofsted. Teachers in the state sector are expected to deliver far more than in the private sector.

Capitalism rules okay

Haha

Education is a positional good. What you get only matters in comparison to other people, other children. If you buy a higher position then you push other children down. That is not a just society, when children are disadvantaged by more affluent children right at the start of their lives.

There you go then, according to that link I was right. Latin and Greek are almost exclusively getting taught in private and some selective schools.
Would it kill you to admit that directly?

And as I said, a good knowledge of Classics is absolutely an advantage in studying a humanities course, because it forms the foundations of so much of Western culture. So, therefore, most state school students are at an easily provable disadvantage from the outset. And that's before we take into account all the many many other factors that PPs have so patiently explained to you on this thread.

Also, the argument isn't "state schools good, independent schools bad". The argument, as so many people have told you, is "independent school confers educational advantage due to significantly higher spend per pupil" and "this should be taken into account at all stages of results analysis, because three years of Oxbridge will have less effect than up to 14 years of school."

drawingmaps even though the grammar that my DC attended was a top ten grammar, it taught no Latin or Greek at any stage and no Classical Civ or Ancient History. It was a desert on the Classics front.

Not clear of the relevance of the study to the original post in any event. I assumed it was intended to imply that state school kids were getting a leg up generally? But as I tried to explain above, there are enormous intellectual and workload challenges for any state school applicant who makes an offer for Classics.

Honestly I didn't read the whole thing, but I read as far as state schools not teaching classics. I didn't realise it was trying to imply some kind of leg up. I know they do offer Classics ab initio but it must be soooo much work! To even start to catch up with someone who's been doing it since year 7. In MFL ab initio students get judged alongside the rest of the cohort in Finals, assuming it's the same for Classics but I haven't checked.

Is it capitalism, though? Corrupt capitalism, maybe? Or corrupted capitalism? Or is this what unfettered capitalism looks like? The UK appears to be a massive money laundering centre. Is this capitalism? Or is something else threatening to rule OK? Do people think all recent political decision making has been based on capitalism?

How much laundered money makes its way through our famous public schools?