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?

I’m not using the NE figures to say outreach is failing - it was to highlight the disparity within the State provision. For, me this is far greater than the State:Private divide.

This.
Thank you ProggyMat

Not only is the disparity greater but there are many more high SES pupils in the state sector than in the private sector - by a factor of about seven. They compete directly for resources, not indirectly like their private counterparts.

Unfortunately their parents form a powerful lobby, a flavour of which permeats this thread.

@goodbyestranger
Certainly as a young doctor you might well want to stay close to the centres of excellence, which are heavily concentrated in London and a small number of other places where house prices are nearly as mad. It matters at least for the high fliers.

Having been a Director of Postgraduate Medical Education in one of the regional deaneries and an admissions tutor, I can say with confidence that it does not matter.

Well you would say that probably, if you are in a regional deanery. You're not likely to tell the junior doctors with the most potential for a ground breaking career that yours isn't the best deanery to join. The junior doctors vote with their feet, which is why many of the regional deaneries are much less applied to and others are incredibly competitive. I'm afraid I'm underwhelmed, again.

I am from the NE from a school where, when I went, no one had ever been to Oxbridge (and that was a small fee paying school). Lucy Kellaway (teacher, used to be FT journalist) wrote an interesting article about her teaching up there in the FT when she moved up from London to teach in the area at a state Catholic school https://on.ft.com/43oWO5D. She mentioned different aspirations for life which might be well be true. Certainly one of my ancestors moved to the NE because of the booming coal fields and money in the 1800s and every one of my siblings and me did not go back afterr university in part because of better money/jobs in the SE. So you get a kind of "brain drain" never mind a people drain from areas without jobs to areas where there are jobs.

My father and his brothers went to a very old state schools in County Durham, grammar school in their day and he and one brother got to Durham/Newcastle to study medicine from there. That school has one pupil going to Durham and one to York (from last year's press release anyway) and not many with high grades.

@Marchesman - what are you actually worried about though? Pressure on other Russell Group unis in the North to start taking middle class privileged state school kids from the South East OVER AND ABOVE Northern kids who felt they had no choice to pay up and go private? Former kids getting all the places in Med Schools and on Law degrees too?
Personally if that is going to be an issue I fully agree that local kids in the North of England should get places over and above those from the South East in an equal privilege bracket. Even if those brackets are somewhat arbitrarily assessed. However, if we do something like that does it then apply to the South East too - locals get more places?
Are you advocating for some kind of privilege banding for all unis?

@JustanothermagicMonday1
What are you actually worried about though?

That is a very fair question. How long have you got?

By the age of 3 there is already a large gap in cognitive test scores between children in the lowest socioeconomic quintile and other children, but this gap widens as they progress through the education system. A strong link exists between the education levels of parents and the achievements of their children, in part genetic and part behavioural, however the widening achievement gap between the ages of 11 and 14 in England is accounted for almost entirely by the fact that children from degree educated parents are far more likely to attend high performing secondary schools and so benefit from a positive school effect.

We have a system in which whoever can afford to live near to the good school has a much higher chance of getting in. But the location of the best comprehensive schools in the most affluent areas incompletely explains social segregation in schools, the underrepresentation of disadvantaged pupils in the best of them is also due to schools admitting lower rates of disadvantaged pupils than live in their catchment areas.

For the highest performing pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, the net effect of social segregation in nominally nonselective state schools may be seen by comparing historic progression rates to selective universities. School leavers in 1976 from the highest socioeconomic quintile were 3.6 times more likely to go to university than those from the lowest socioeconomic quintile, by 2010 that ratio had risen to 7.3 for the same universities. The accepted view was that intervention at the point of HE entry is too late, but prompted by Smith and Naylor in 2001 and similar research, and ignoring its own (Parks 2012) Cambridge came out with its APP, which in my view is unnecessarily flawed - to the point of demonstrably causing harm, for reasons that have largely been covered.

Ahh, different decision in this household.

Feedback DD received from friends has been that London hospitals are often too busy to nurture F1s. I also understand that there has been a change in London allocations which means you can be sent just about anywhere. Add in SJT as a form of random number generator and she decided to opt out. (Not the only one, some friends last year opted for Scotland with no regrets)

So she is heading for Deanery with a strong reputation in the area she wants to work in, low house prices, a really good selection of rotations all within 30 minutes of where she plans to live, and hopefully a good work life balance. (She is busy researching sports teams she might join.)

We know someone who went there for F1/F2 and has now at the Evalina for his paeds training. And are reassured by a high flying medic friend (ranked top 5 n the world for her specialisation) the her department are always happy to recruit registrars/consultants who trained elsewhere in the UK.

The whole F1/F2 allocation system is changing yet again with the aim, seemingly, of ensuring that high flying young doctors do not feel they have to come to London for training. DD at least seems determined to try out the scenic route. Plenty of time to work in London later.

A great deal to be said for the scenic route Needmoresleep. I think almost without exception DS1's peers from Oxford opted for the not scenic route.

21 year olds often went to be with their friends from university in London. I can definitely see how many of my sons' friends from university are jsut about all now working in London at least for the first few years. It is one reason London is better able to attract young teachers, including through Teach First and why even deprived London schools seems to have more opportunities than the NE.

I agree with the statistics mentioned above that that gap has widened 3.6 v 7.3 times. It may be as simple as (a) grammar schools disappeared so the reoute of out povert of those areas such as the NE where most people at grammar school came from homes without much money as that was most homes in the area concerned or it may be (b) the not very popular view that perhaps we have had so many years of fair opportunities that we have now reached a point, give so many marriages between those of similar educational level that the children of those who are may be brighter and those at the other end of the scale are simply like their parents. When the boss married the girl from the typing pool 20 years younger than he is and he wanted her to keep his house rather than talk about business perhaps we had more mixing of different people. Mind that may be a load of rubbish given perhaps bigger not smaller class differences of the past. Although IQ (for those who set any store on it) tends to move to a little less it is not so big a movement lower to affect the fact that two brighter parents tend to have bright children. Parents IQ 130 each might have child of 128. Parents IQ 90 might have child of 95 (100 being average IQ).

@ProggyMat - so, an example of Cambridge’s systems working, then, as your child stood a far better chance of getting a place at Cambridge than a state educated child from an OK school in the SE in quintiles 4 or 5, despite your dd’s supportive, savvy parents and educational advantages. Your position is not remotely threatened, given the difficulty Cambridge is having in finding appropriate people of lower SES - I am sure they are delighted to have people like your child thrown at them for free by their private schools. It’s just that, what with more children like yours getting places and more state educated children getting places, that’s even fewer places for the privately educated who pay full fees, and I’m afraid I can’t get worked up about that on the back of the data that @Marchesman has provided, as it is nowhere near detailed enough to come to the spectacular conclusions that they have jumped to on the back of it.

@Walkaround “That’s even fewer places for the privately educated who pay full fees” - the problem being that if it is true then those rich people won’t use private schooling anymore and will shift at key points to selective Sixth Forms or buy in catchment schools, a phenomenon already being observed. I know people on Mumsnet say nobody can play that game because unis look at where pupils took their GCSEs, but is that actually true? It does not ring true from my own direct experience of observing what some friends have done.

Because if anyone thinks a grammar school or top performing comp is not going to take those ex private school kids with a string of 9s into Sixth Form, then they are a little bit naive. All parts of the chain of education have performance at heart and attracting non disruptive studious pupils, and are incentivised accordingly. It is much easier to run a school of that ilk and recruit into such a school. No one institution is driven by a pure social conscience. That is just not how institutions work. However, to blame Cambridge University for playing a game everyone else is at, I think is a bit unfair, no?

So @Walkaround how are you going to stop private school parents changing at Sixth Form level when it is literally the law that Sixth Forms can be selective?Anecdotal I know, but I have friends who live in Winchester who claim that that is going on en masse.

And a quick Google search vindicates my point entirely:

https://www.independentschoolparent.com/school/moving-from-state-to-private-education/

Moving from State to Private EducationBy Independent School Parent | Fri 3rd Sep 2021

It pays dividends to opt in and out of state and private education – all it takes it’s the right know-how and the right timing
When it comes to private education, you could say that the canniest parents in the land belong to the “In and Out Club”. With the cost of independent school fees rising faster than average household incomes, it can be a shrewd policy to opt in and out of the state system to preserve savings for the most vital periods of a child’s education.
From the outside, core members of the “In and Out Club” seem to have nerves of steel – not to mention admirable long-term planning abilities and an address in a superior catchment area – as they move their children with the dexterity of the trader parlaying his investments into a large fortune.
In the economic climate of today, however, membership of the “In and Out Club” appeals to all, with or without the catchment advantage. It pays to be savvy. And that starts with considering the pros and cons of engineering an education in this way.
For example, when is it most advantageous to opt into the state system? Does it jeopardise your child’s chance of winning a place at public school? Might it improve their chance of acceptance by a top university later on? Is it more successfully orchestrated with girls, who move at 11-plus, than boys whose parents intend them to go down the Common Entrance route?
Planning your child’s educational route

According to current belief, the ideal trajectory goes like this: Nursery (private), primary (state), Year Seven to GCSE (private), sixth form (state). A private Nursery offers cosy classes, which ensure your child develops an appetite for learning from the start. State primary can be terrific, but, even if merely adequate, a child’s progress is eminently boost-able with careful home input.
Private is preferable leading up to GCSEs, as the triangular efforts of on-the-case specialist teachers, supportive parents and motivated children produce results. State education for sixth form appeals, given the annual outcry that public school students have lost out on places at universities to less-qualified state sixth form college leavers.”

Christ who could be bothered with all that manoeuvring?! Move to a non deprived area be an involved supportive but firm loving parent who instills good values and encourages extra curricular that they enjoy send your kids to the local school and get on with your bloody life.

@JustanothermagicMonday1 I don't know about Cambridge, but Oxford definitely takes GCSE settings into account in its scoring for interview decisions. It doesn't do it bluntly (ie '+5 for comp, -5 for Eton') - it looks at the results you achieved at GCSE and compares them against the average GCSE attainment in your school in your year. So nothing directly to do with private/state/selective, and everything to do with whether you outperformed your directly comparable peers, and if so by how much. However, if you're at a school like SPGS (or some state schools) where many pupils achieve a raft of 8s and 9s, it's hard to score well on that particular element. It's only one of the scores elements that Oxford uses, not the sole one.

I don't think it adjusts for sixth form setting explicitly.

@Walkaround How are you defining an OK school in the SE - particular those with a cohort of students from high SES households?
I don’t think my DD was educationally advantaged as opposed to her more affluent friends that attended some State schools in the NE so I’m hardly going to accept that she is so against a more affluent contemporary in the SE.
That’s because I don’t think that the category ‘State school’ can be considered as a homogenous group- let alone the kids educated within it. Equally so with the category ‘Private school’.
For me, the longer the focus is on the State:Private divide the more the disparity grows within the State system.
DD has a supportive parent, by the way- always just been the two of us.
And the notion that you say your position is not remotely threatened spectacularly misses the point!

“Christ who could be bothered with all that manoeuvring?!”

It is an observable phenomenon in London, for sure.

Ha see why we moved out when ours were babies then! Good call.

There were plenty in DDs peer group who were very much London or bust. Not necessarily the most able, but definitely the most ambitious. She suspects a good proportion will drift out of medicine fairly quickly into law and banking roles. Day to day medicine is not very glamourous. .

DD has been around intense ambition since she was at the sort of school where almost 50% would get Oxbridge offers. One of her friends stopped speaking to her after offers came out. The friend had moved on and was solely interested in mixing with those who were also going to Oxbridge. (We saw this quite a lot, my theory was that some London parents put so much emphasis on academic success that kids started to believe that they were only had worth if they excelled, and starting judging peers on the same criteria, difficult for DD as though she was no less bright, her dyslexia often meant lower marks.)

This has left DD with a strange ambivalence. She chose not to apply to Oxbridge/London, despite teacher encouragement, yet really enjoyed her strongly academic intercalation at Imperial. She also really enjoyed her super selective sixth form, where her breadth, compared with some of the super academic, meant she picked up some good leadership roles, though she still got fazed by the "top table" girls who needed to reassure themselves (or their parents), by asking what mark she got in class tests. The points system for F1/F2 placement is odd, but early on her mentor told her not to worry. She would be fine, wherever she went as she had the makings of a good Doctor and ultimately that would be the thing that counted.

And that may answer the thread. DCs school, with about 90% of the year group applying for Oxbridge, always had a few surprises either way. DS was a credible but not outstanding candidate. He did not get a place at Cambridge but did fine at LSE, which led to a funded PhD at a good US University. His friend who was a far more interesting candidate did much more than fine at Imperial where he was able to get completely absorbed in a fast moving area of technology, and gained a prestigious scholarship to an overseas university. Another friend took his 5A*s to a northern University where against he shone, had a great time, and stayed on for a PhD.

Small fish, big pond or vice versa? A scenic route that allows you to develop a work life balance and reduces any risk of burn out, or jump straight into the competition.

I don't really see a problem with Oxbridge rejecting able private school students. If they are good they will go elsewhere and excel. Already it is debatable whether Oxbridge offer the best economics, engineering or even medicine courses in the UK. A lot is about who you are rather than the University you went to. The more able students Oxbridge reject, the stronger the cohort elsewhere, which has to be a good thing. At the same time a good school is not just about marks and Oxbridge entry. It is about enjoying learning and education. It is about following interests. It is about having a good level of discipline but also valuing wider skills such as music, sport, art and leadership, and understanding that a good education may lead to earning a lot, but is also an obligation to contribute to society. The best thing a school can do is prepare a student to make the most of their University education. If they have this, which University does not matter so much.

The friend had moved on and was solely interested in mixing with those who were also going to Oxbridge

Wtf?

Small fish, big pond or vice versa? A scenic route that allows you to develop a work life balance and reduces any risk of burn out, or jump straight into the competition

Reducing risk of burn out is to be lauded and a brave choice in its way - I guess that there's an argument that as these young people leave uni it's the summer of their lives, so if you're going to burn, burn then, but hopefully not out.

Ha see why we moved out when ours were babies then! Good call.

We were never in London but I'm exceptionally grateful that we weren't - the culture sounds toxic.

Yes I witnessed it with older work colleagues the stress and angst about schooling was alien to me as I grew up in the SW so moved back there well before school became an issue. Young children being assessed and rejected seemed wrong to me.

@ProggyMat
For me, the longer the focus is on the State:Private divide the more the disparity grows within the State system.

I believe that is its prime if not sole purpose. It certainly suits the most vocal segment of the population; and if you are a Cambridge academic with two or three children at Hills Road it is impossible not to have a personal bias. Anyone who doubts this should read the conclusion to "Attainment Outcomes" more carefully.

@JustanothermagicMonday1 - You are talking about a London-centric and state grammar school area issue more than a nationwide one, in all honesty. The whole of the South East is not populated by people who behave like this, however much it may feel like it if you live in that tiny, feverish bubble of people who would clearly prefer to go private all the way in any event; and the numbers capable of dipping in and out of state education like that are reducing phenomenally rapidly, due to the growing gulf between the wealthiest 0.1% and everyone else, and the inability of private schools to remain remotely affordable to the majority in the supposedly wealthiest quintiles, who are also highly unlikely to receive much help in the way of bursaries. So you could argue that the truly buggered are the middle classes who want to provide as well as they can for their children’s education, but neither have sufficient wealth to ensure that, nor sufficient poverty to receive help, not the poorest who have the nouse and motivation to seek a good education for their kids. You could also argue that there is a deeply paranoid and competitive group of people who wind each other up no end, and mostly their children could
be just as successful living in a less pushy, but still perfectly safe and pleasant part of the world where the schools are merely reasonable, and still be able to commute to work from there, or work from home, and still get their children into Oxbridge because, actually, their children have the raw ability and personality required already, without having their lives made miserable by excessively pushy parents.

The poorest who don’t know or care what they are missing out on will not be dragged kicking and screaming into Oxbridge by anybody - the whole structure of society would have to change before they can be motivated to believe that anything they ever do will make a difference to their condition. And, given that it is increasingly difficult to live a comfortable lifestyle on the back of being an academic, or having a career that requires a very academic university education, it’s not surprising wealth acquisition by any other means looks more appealing to many people. Intellectual stimulation doesn’t feed the stomach.

Obviously, there are all sorts of ways of dealing with manipulative behaviour that involve collecting more detailed data, or exceptionally blunt methods, like capping the number of places offered to specific schools, so that the pushiest have to spread themselves about a bit more, but I’m not going to offer any suggestions, because I am not putting myself forward as an expert on this, just questioning those who, judging by the confidence of their conclusions, appear to think they are more expert than Cambridge university. All I know or care at this point in time is that my children are unusually able and I will always support them to achieve their aims, but I will not join the paranoid, pushy circles who move their kids around like chess pieces in order to garner some imagined, or even real, advantage. If they do not get into Oxford or Cambridge, then so be it.

In the longer term, I think the greater the extremes between the wealthiest and everyone else, the unhealthier the society, so one way of limiting this behaviour would be not to accept living in a system that has quite such a strong stomach for obscene inequalities and which then puts a microscopic plaster over the vast divide between the super-rich and everyone else by offering bursaries to poor children who are expected to dance to the whims of their kindly benefactors in return for their largesse. Neo-liberal capitalism, or corrupt, money-laundering “blind eye” capitalism, or whatever you want to call the money-obsessed society we now live in, like communism, is a failure, imvho, and has resulted in an unproductive, inefficient economy, far too reliant on the proceeds of overseas crime and gambling in the City of London. There is too much interest in profit for the few, and too little interest in anything else - too much focus on a degree being a route to profit, not to thinking about other pressing issues.

True. Do not underestimate the pressure some kids are under.

DS was in the same year as the girl's older sister, who he assumed was a maths genius. We now realise she was coached to the eyeballs. A Cambridge place was a failure - she wanted Trinity, and perhaps unsurprisingly then had a breakdown. DS then also discovered that a friend who did go to Cambridge but might have been happier in a more cosmopolitan London had spent every Christmas and Easter school vacation at a full time tutorial college. (He was from East Asia and only went home in summer.) Again DS assumed this boy was far cleverer than him. Weirdly, when I asked DS recently what he felt were the advantages of going to a super selective school, he said that it was an advantage never to have been at the top of his class. Almost everyone else in the very international cohort of his PhD programme were top of their class at both school and University, and found it hard to adjust to being "ordinary". (A known Oxbridge problem.) DS, who started out in the sixth set for maths A level, has never faced this yet is doing just fine.

DD now describes this highly competitive environment as toxic. (She also took part in an individual sport which was favoured by those looking to gain sports credentials to help them with their US applications.) Hence a desire to stay away from "overachievers" and find a scenic route. She has the advantage of knowing she is as good as them and could have opted for the same, but sees the benefits of broadening her experience. Not that long ago she was invited to a party where some of her school peers who had gone on to Oxbridge and then to the City, decided to lecture her and her vet med student friend about how an Oxbridge education was automatically superior, regardless of subject. The two girls were having none of it. A lot of those who went to Oxbridge still very much hang out together. To DD this seems narrow and none of the friends DD is still in touch with went.