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?

Where I live and where I work, people on 160000 household income typically use the state sector, unless they already have a house with substantial equity (via grandparents usually). Or the grandparents pay the private school fees.

You simply cannot buy even a 3 terraced bed small house in most of London now under close to a million pounds. If you have private school fees x2 or x3 or even x 4 to pay you can’t remortgage, you can’t live. Nor is there any financial assistance going to be available even if you have a genius child who would benefit from an Eton education. Especially if the genius child has lots of siblings.

It is most definitely asset wealth and not income wealth that counts. However, asset wealth isn’t taxed properly in this country.

Extortionate house prices are the real issue here and the huge differences across the country. My generation of Oxbridge Alumni (often met at uni so often 2x alumni) is typically in this income bracket if they stayed in London. Some are earning millions as partners in law firms or top bankers, but many are doctors, teachers in private schools, lawyers (not of the partner type), accountants, actuaries, engineers, teachers in state schools, academics, lots of journalists etc. - basically the professional middle classes. The kids of those parents who want to go to Oxford and or Cambridge are typically getting in, regardless of what type or school they went to. It is just an easier nicer experience to go to private school which translates to less stress with the teens.

Which says to me keep your money if you are in that bracket and don’t waste it on private schools (spend it on the economy or housing or pension instead) if you have a bright, happy and resilient, sociable child with no SEN. Sometimes I wonder whether that is the true political motivation - spend it on the economy.
Except that if you do pay school fees you are also paying for a vast number of people to be employed and a whole community and they all pay tax too. Better that then sticking it into paper housing wealth?
I don’t know what the answer is. What is actually better for the economy?

I do know that it isn’t a university’s job with some proportion of government funding to fix all ills in society.
I am also not sure if there has been any real shifting from “one privileged” group to another because where I am sitting many are using the state sector or are in the in and out club (increasingly a child with eg dyslexia is the only one of 3 siblings to be sent to private school after failure to thrive in the state sector). However, this is a very London centric view.

I have also noticed that a lot of people I work with who were born abroad or come from ethnic minorities are put off by the comprehensive model of state education. So they are choosing private schools or superselective grammars or sending their kids far off on 1 hour commutes to school.

As well as doing outreach in Tower Hamlets at work, I have also been volunteering locally in state primary schools and reading with young kids, doing forest school that kind of thing for years. By age 6/7 you can usually tell what their eventual educational outcome is going to be as a combo of intelligence and type of parents and what school choices they are going to make for their children. And I applaud the single immigrant mum on benefits who goes all out on tutoring for her girls and I have seen this translate to real educational success for the child on several occasions.

Why is lack of aspiration less of an issue in London? Is it the competitive survival vibe that kicks in? Is it really just more funding? Or is it the moving energy of the place? Is seeing a purposeful person in a suit daily a driver for a child? I don’t know what the answer is.

@JustanothermagicMonday1 - well, when London state schools were failing and making the capital look a less attractive place for wealth creators to live, a huge injection of extra cash and energy was put into London state schools. So I think everyone knows the answer to that one. If you attract attention and resources to your area, the results miraculously improve.

*but only if the attention and resources are going to the state schools, as London private schools always had a good thing going…

Not much money going to working class boys in seaside towns. Guess who underperforms?

Guess who is also accused of being lazy and feckless?

It’s actually very hard not to fit the narrative going on around you - when you are under difficult circumstances and are being told it is your fault, the inclination is to stick with those like you, where you feel safest and least judged. It takes a lot of effort to het away from that mindset, and if deeply entrenched, probably several generations.

This idea that private school pupils do better because their parents are more intelligent and therefore richer sounds like a load of nonsense. Intelligence is not the only, or even the greatest, indicator of economic success later in life. There have been studies that show intelligent children of wealthy parents are far more likely to succeed than those of poor parents for all the reasons discussed and others. There are many, many highly intelligent people floating around who do not earn much money. There are plenty of very rich folk around who are thick as two short planks.

Then there is personality and choice. Confidence and high self-esteem will get you a long way in the world of business, finance etc without an Oxbridge background. There are also many bright kids who choose not to go down that route. Anecdotally, I was at a comp in the 90s - was always considered "very bright". I got straight As and As at GCSE when A had just been introduced. Straight As at A-level. I didn't even consider Oxbridge - I thought the courses looked boring and old-fashioned. I got a First from a Russell group university then chose to become a teacher.

If I think about all the "successful" (ie rich) people I know, most of them went to fairly low-rated Universities but then made different choices after. Several are consultants and earn a fortune but come from a very bog-standard educational background. The only one of my circle that sends their kids to private school went to Coventry university. With the introduction of "university-blind" applications, where you went to University won't matter anyway.

I also know some extremely intelligent people who went to Oxbridge who have not succeeded at life. There’s more to success than intelligence. Likeability charm and competence will get you far further in life than an Oxbridge degree.

I agree with all of the recent posts.

“Not much money going to working class boys in seaside towns. Guess who underperforms?”

Yes, those schools should attract additional funding if you think FSM and pupil premium is not enough.

What I am saying though is that outreach by elite universities is not enough. One should be tapping the private sector more and more in the form of ESG, for example. If you really care, start emailing all the CEOs of online banks, for example, with specific ideas of how you think they could add value in that regard.

When we first started showing Muslim girls from Tower Hamlets around law firms in the mid 2000s typically the standard response was “oh it isn’t that posh or weird” - they literally just needed to go into an office and envisage themselves there, admire the views, talk to a few people, made to feel comfortable. I am not advocating for that old fashioned approach of showing the boys round the garage full of Ferraris etc. but I am sure you get the gist.

@JustanothermagicMonday1 That type of experience can work but parents can be stubbornly anti well paid job. I took a family member to Oxford. Her dad said openly “that’s not for the likes of us, is it luv?” and laughed. Quite honestly, parents have to want it too. London parents have demonstrated they wanted better. It was all around them. So why not want a slice? Where family member comes from, “doing well“ is working for the council or the NHS. .You can do that by going to any university. So no need to aim high. Ditto with teaching. So ambition beyond a certain level is absent. Others see a broader spectrum of jobs and parents encourage this. Others seem happy to stay as they are.

Not sure how anyone in benefits can afford tutors?

Also private school is not just about results. Education at the best schools is far broader then that.

@TizerorFizz - “Not sure how anyone in benefits can afford tutors?” In certain cultures, the wider family (brother, uncle etc) helps out for the purpose of education, sometimes even taking debt etc or selling land back home etc. The wider family expectation being that any success in wider family will be fed back one way or another.

@lavenderlou

The heritability of intelligence is not seriously contested now, and the correlation between SES and intelligence has been accepted for substantially longer. However, intelligence is only one of several characteristics that contribute to the heritability of academic attainment. For example:

"Although intelligence accounts for more of the heritability of GCSE than any other single domain, the other domains collectively account for about as much GCSE heritability as intelligence. Together with intelligence, these domains account for 75% of the heritability of GCSE. We conclude that the high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence." Krapohl et al 2014
https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.1408777111

This is for GCSE; in my line of work, in my experience, intelligence is less important than motivation.

https://developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/what-is-epigenetics-and-how-does-it-relate-to-child-development/

This is what I find more fascinating.

My fairly wise psychiatrist father always said we were all about 50% genes and 50% environment. I think later research shows genes come a little more to the fore and the othe rinteresting issue is what happens to you in the womb. I don't really like the idea of the latter as as ever it could blame women (a woman's place in the wrong etc), but is does seem to have some validity. https://www.science.org/content/article/homosexuality-may-start-womb and in some other areas too.

On what parents and teenagers want Lucy Kellaway's article I linked above explains how she was so surprised at the differences of aims between those in her previous London mixed race comprehensive with plenty of children fighting tootgh and nail as children of immigrants to get right on top of good jobs etc to the white Catholic school in the NE where there just seemed to be a contentment not to bother to fights for anything like that if instead you could just have a nice afternoon in front of the TV, I am certainly not saying everyone from the NE is like that and I am from there but it was a good illustration of what "best" or your aims might be being hugely variable.

Also in the 11+ days in the NE (which ended in about 1970 as no grammar schools since then) by going to the grammar school indeed in any part of the UK yo could in a sense be taken away form your won communjty and values and change and not necessarily be happier as caught between two worlds. It brings to mind indigenous children in Canada and Australia taken to boarding school - many more opportunities but rent asunder from family and changed. When my father was dying in Newcastle his team of about 10 part time carers at his home who came and went on a rota could not understand how we coul dbe loving children but had moved hundreds of miles from home for work as their culture was to live next to their parents their whole lives. Yet our parents were really glad that we like they did left home for university and did not live close. My parents saw that our success and gain but a different mind set thought that was cruel, unusual, uncaring, weird.

I was looking at this initial report for solicitors from Exeter University (although it only looked at existing studies) on why some people are passing law exams at post grad level at much higher rates than others which is quite interesting although I feel slightly biased in some ways https://www.sra.org.uk/globalassets/documents/sra/research/ethnicity-attainment-gap-legal-professional-assessments-literature-review.pdf?version=49c157

@thing47

It's not so much about the teaching. In my experience, there are good and bad teachers in all schools. It's the intake in the first place.

@thing47
Interestingly, that's not what the data shows

It is exactly what the data shows. Pupil selection, whether it is socioeconomic or academic, or more usually a combination of the two, is emphatically the most important factor by far. Teachers are 'merely' the most important factor within schools that policy makers can affect to improve student achievement.

On average the teacher effect explains a variation of about a third of a GCSE grade but the effect is much greater for low SES pupils. Which is presumably the reason that social segregation in schools is harmful to educational outcomes at a national level. Reducing segregation, and diluting teacher quality for high SES pupils, does little or no harm to them while improving outcomes for lower SES pupils markedly.

https://www.suttontrust.com/our-research/improving-impact-teachers-pupil-achievement-uk-interim-findings/

@JustanothermagicMonday1

The point I made about income wealth, I think still stands. Firstly the figure I gave was for household incomes starting from £300,000 p.a. This was from a 2019 article which would have used even older data. Even in London this would cover day school prices for a couple of children.

40% of these families choose not to go down that route, they therefore have a significant disposable income that they invest in housing, which pushes up prices in the catchment areas of good state schools. This has two advantages, first they accumulate (non-income) wealth, providing house prices continue to rise, secondly they have an advantage when universities, +/- industry, apply contextual criteria to admission/recruitment.

However, this does not reflect what happens in the rest of the country where the house price premium for good state schools is only £25,000 and is therefore achievable for all but the poorest.

https://www.pwc.co.uk/services/economics/insights/how-school-performance-affects-house-prices-england.html

@Marchesman - this is interesting https://www.suttontrust.com/our-research/tutoring-2023-the-new-landscape/

• “Tutoring is higher at grammar schools (23%) than independent schools (19%) or comprehensive schools (18%). There is substantial variation in the comprehensive sector: at the least deprived schools, rates were 31%, compared to 12% at the most deprived schools.
• Those in professional/managerial households (24%), were more likely than those in routine/manual households (11%). Those with a graduate parent were twice as likely to receive tutoring as those without (26% to 13%).
• There were also substantial differences by ethnicity. 33% of Black African pupils received tutoring, followed by Indian (32%) and Bangladeshi (32%). This is twice the rate among White pupils (16%). Among working class households only, Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Black African pupils had the highest rates of private tutoring, more than 3 times higher than White pupils.
• London is substantially above other regions (27%) in private tutoring rates, compared to 12% in the North East. South East (19%) and East of England (18%) were the closest to rates in the capital. Tutoring is also associated with lower levels of neighbourhood deprivation. While cities had the highest tutoring rates, this was not substantially higher than rural areas.”

@JustanothermagicMonday1

I was just about to say that the fun statistic for me from the paper that you kindly flagged up is that the proportion of pupils at grammar schools being privately tutored is so high, nearly 1 in 4 is astonishing. They seem to be the same demographic as receive tutoring to get in. I may have missed it but I don't see confirmation that they are actually the same pupils, but it would seem logical. If they need tutoring to get in, they are more likely to need tutoring to keep up. It is tempting to suggest that it ties in with the Cambridge data on grammar school students

The number at private schools is also interesting. It has always struck me as bizarre that parents should choose a private school that requires outside help to meet their requirements.

Regarding epigenetics, it will be interesting to see how this plays out in relation to structural brain changes, and the able FSM pupils who are lost between 11 and 16.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4414816/

Perhaps it was inevitable that gut organisms would also get in on the act.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/twin-research-and-human-genetics/article/epigenetic-influences-on-neurodevelopment-at-11-years-of-age-protocol-for-the-longitudinal-peripostnatal-epigenetic-twins-study-at-11-years-of-age-pets11/336452A9F36F1DF9C2721325A32B3AA4

I have sometimes said that I paid fees to buy a peer group for teenagers where everyone has passed a very difficult entrance exam, has parents other than bursary students willing to pay (and in my case I bought single sex schooling too) and a peer group where just about everyone from upper sixth goes to good universities and gets high A level grades.. So that is in a sense is paying to segregrate on a lot of different fronts.

The girls v boys issue for teenagers is also interesting. I think boys do best academically in mixed sex classes as girls tend to civilise them and girls work harder (on the whole - I am obviously generalising) whereas girls suffer more and do worse in mixed sex schools and it can be harder to do traditionally "male" subjects for girls.

@JustanothermagicMonday1 - yes, but outreach is easy in London. Try asking a City law firm to send a few of its employees off to volunteer in a poor seaside town miles from London every week, and how much uptake do you think you will get? It’s far less effort to tick the box in Tower Hamlets and move on - and you can pat yourselves on the back about helping these poor, hard working, noble immigrants, who are so much more grateful and hard working than the lazy, white British boys in nowheresville. What businesses do you think are actually based nearby to reach out to these people? Why do you think they are so disengaged in the first place? Why do you think poor people in the North East are still so angry about being exploited for centuries in mills, mines and factories, then being dumped and blamed for not all getting on their bikes and creating something from nothing by themselves? London, meanwhile, benefited from investment after investment, and businesses were falling over themselves to virtue signal that they were willing to help the “deserving poor” (the ones close enough to affect them).

If you want to provide serious help to an area, the Government needs to make it look palatable first by investing huge amounts of money in it, like it has done in London, which has had obscene amounts spent on it. The longer a place is neglected, the more money has to be spent to revive it before big business will start to sidle in to take take the credit and the convenient benefits laid on for it. Then more people will move into the area who have vibrant, interesting ideas. It just doesn’t work the other way round, and nor does mealy mouthed investment, which is frankly just a cosmetic waste of time, following which everyone can frown seriously and blame the locals for not taking up the amazing opportunities offered by the new sports centre, which some spotty oik vandalised on day 2.

A system based on a tiny elite and people treated like assets more than humans, with consequential massive inequalities, creates the mindsets it deserves, which is not a very productive one.

@Xenia

It is most definitely segregation and it is a prerequisite for school success - in terms of getting better results than other schools. But statistically it was probably not necessary for your children's attainment; and it helped segregation in the state sector where it matters most because the chances are that if you are well off you will live in an affluent area and would have no choice but to take some of the best state school places available.

(Boys in single sex schools are also more likely to take traditional female (humanity) subjects than in mixed schools, therefore arguably better to keep them apart academically on the whole.)

It is tempting to suggest that it ties in with the Cambridge data on grammar school students

In what way OP? I've looked back at the tables again, and the statistics and the narrative too, and Cambridge is quite clear that there is no statistical significance between educational background and subsequent performance. Cambridge certainly doesn't say that grammar students perform less well than either independent or comprehensive students year on year.

That said, from my experience of the grammar school sector, I think it's unarguable that those kids who get tutoring along the way are also likely to have had tutoring at the 11+ stage. Whether this got them over the line is a more moot point. It may have done, particularly a number of years ago. Those are the parents with the tutoring mindset apart from anything else. It's this sub group which are more likely to have difficulties keeping up, the ones where tutoring did actually help at the 11+ stage.

However, I also think it's highly unlikely to have any bearing whatsoever on any Oxbridge statistics because - purely anecdotally but quite persuasively - and everyone knew which people in their class had outside tutors - those were never the same students who got Oxbridge offers or indeed even applied, they tended to be much further down the class. My anecdata is based on having had eight DC at a superselective between 2001 and 2020 and having been involved in admissions policy (including widening participation) for twelve of those years.

@Walkaround - I wasn’t thinking of a City law firm. I meant tapping more into online sector or this kind of thing https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/gymshark-ben-francis-britain-business/

The great thing about online technology is that you can mentor online and teach coding etc online. Companies can arrange trips for 16 year olds to visit etc.

ESG is going to be huge and should be tapped to work for the right things.

https://www.taylorwessing.com/en/interface/2023/esg-reporting-tech-and-data/esg-reporting-requirements-in-the-uk

@JustanothermagicMonday1 - well, if they are provided with adequate housing, internet connections, computers, headsets, time and space to do work, and none of it gets nicked or broken before they have had a chance to use it… and they don’t get told that they don’t need an education, because they can all be a social media influencer like Andrew Tate… If you are a long way removed from the reality it really isn’t quite the same, and covid showed how unhealthy it was for kids to be spending a lot of time online. It’s hard to understand why Londoners don’t understand, but if they seldom if ever physically visit these places, and people from there seldom leave them, it is a bit difficult for them to comprehend each other or find anything in common to build from.