Is Trinity Hall Cambridge right about elite schools?

[mids2019]

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/jan/07/cambridge-college-elite-private-schools-student-recruitment

Interesting position but maybe there are those at Cambridge that think encouraging students from the state sector has gone too far? Wonder if other colleges will follow suit.

My DS is currently doing a masters at a conservatoire.

no East Asian students on his course (piano and strings are not traditional instruments for his preferred instrument/style).

lots of white privately educated students though.

Ah so it is a left wing politics of envy thing for you? I knew it, I can see you guys a mile off.

Those contextual offers you described sound entirely reasonable to me, it would seem silly to make you sit A levels again. Quite happy with mature students getting a different process from non mature students, as long as it’s the same process for all mature students. Make sense?

Cat amongst the contextual pigeons ... the area you live in can get you a contextual offer even if you've attended outstanding state settings in different catchment.

@Araminta1003 We used to have a county wide music service and dc had instrument loans, very cheap or free group lessons, orchestras (these needed transport and effort) and of course dc needed to practice. They also ran choirs and an amazing jazz orchestra. It’s cut to the bone now and even then there were some schools where hardly any child applied for lessons even though many would have had them for free. It was totally the musical families or middle classes whose dc had the lessons.When I was a governor of a primary school in a relatively poor area with few 11 plus passes, dc didn’t even want to sing! Choirs in school were difficult!

Oddly, despite the magnitude of the significance of school type, it gets no mention in either the executive summary or the conclusions. Just the sort of thing that will be right up your street.

As you say, we have different values.

Cambridge doesn’t make any contextual offers. We take contextual factors into account when deciding whether to make an offer, but every offer is the standard offer of A*AA (or above). We look at the school/s attended as well as other contextual flags. It’s not based on one flag more than any other.

It’s wide open for discrimination, especially when there’s pressure to fill arbitrary left wing identity quotas. Even when applied as fairly as possible with no deliberate agenda, you can’t distill a child’s challenges into little tick box exercises. Who decides the tick boxes?
A levels may not be a perfect measurement, but they provide a good measure of intelligence as well as the commitment to work hard. Yes a better school makes a huge difference but it’s down to the child to put in that work and have the intelligence to begin with. It’s a crabs in a bucket mentality to want to discriminate against those children.

Answer very often - both. They start at the Perse and breathe a sigh of relief when they can switch to the (free) Hill Road (which offers Latin but not Greek right now). It’s a well-trodden route.

@ThePerfectWeekend
When she attended open days she felt out of place at several universities, Oxbridge were not the only ones.

Why did she feel out of place?

To get extra time you need diagnosis and this diagnosis must explicitly say that the child requires extra time.
No private school will allow extra time without proper diagnosis.

As we discussed on many PS threads, a lot of parents chose private education because of SEN and state schools failing their kids. The same parents are more likely to push for diagnosis, privately if needed.

Why did you bring this stats on this thread? to suggest some gaming of the system?

@nearlylovemyusername I'm sorry but private schools gaming the concessions system is well-known. Similar to how so many of them inflated grades during covid.

So many posters here just seem to blithely accept the 'fact' that privately educated students are more suited to Oxbridge, especially for arts and humanities subjects, because they are more rounded and have had the entire output of Radio 4 magically transmitted to them somehow (definitely not by listening to it, though - oh no, only plebs would need to actually listen to it) and, well, that's that.

If the figure of 19% of state school-educated students getting firsts compared to 29% of privately educated students is correct, I don't see that as a horrific figure that implies it's a waste of time trying to widen participation. Clearly most students don't get firsts, regardless of schooling.

@nearlylovemyusername - it is not about kids with SEND. Elite private schools have a lot of kids on extra time too. The press have picked up on it, people are gossiping about it and the kids themselves talk about it too.
It cannot be that people complain about slight contextual offers and Oxbridge taking more state school pupils without also being honest about private schools having much higher percentage of kids on extra time in national exams. As you know, I am anti VAT on education, but on the whole I prefer transparency. And the extra time in private schools sounds fishy to me, especially some of the most elite ones.

@nearlylovemyusername DD and me felt out of place and she was privately educated! It’s in the Q&A sessions at subject talks where inadequacy sets in. DC and some parents are somewhat intellectually obnoxious. I’ve no idea where they were educated but certainly the parents were trying to be clever and a few dc too! DD thought they were idiots and did realise not everyone is an intellectual snob.

Also at some of these events, dc will attend in a group from their school. Dd was the only one from hers and I’ve no doubt that happens in the state sector where schools persuade hardly anyone to apply.

That’s the issue deep down. It’s being “groomed” to apply. Intellectual parents who have been themselves see it as a right that dc go. Those of us who haven’t been haven’t given much thought to it until much later in the life of dc. So the dc where there’s an entitlement behave differently and they know the ropes - others notice and feel inadequate . It’s that simple and it’s not what school they’ve been to.

I explained the reasons why.
This seems to be completely logical to me.

For disclosure - my eldest was at one of the schools mentioned on this thread. DC had extra time, but school waited until I got them diagnosed and report explicitly requested extra time. Nothing fishy. Just heavily invested parents who have drive/resources to push for diagnosis.

"Politics of envy"? How about recognition that it's best for the country to get the best kids educated to the max regardless of background? Having all the top seats occupied by mediocre privileged people like Boris Johnson is bad for all of us, as we found out when he imposed those utterly batshit Covid rules that were often impossible for most people to comply with.

It wasn't that the course director didn't "make me sit A-levels again", it's that he didn't ask me about them at all. He was interested in why I wanted to study that programme and what I'd been doing outside of my day job in retail to develop that interest. For someone who is posting about how privilege is somehow correlated with educational attainment, your reading comprehension isn't that great. It's almost as if you articulate a "politics of fear", fear that wealth, titles, and connections aren't going to get you the top spots any more.

Wow. Parents get to take part in the open days now?! Mine would have loved to have come along as they had never been to University, never mind Cambridge. But no way were they invited and nor did I want them there. (1991).

There were parent sessions on open days when I was looking at universities over 20 years ago.

If I were a University admissions tutor I’d automatically reject any candidate who needed their parents to hold their hand and speak for them at an open day. And yes I do know that the parents are financially exposed, still no reason for them to be there at the academic sessions.

If you read my post again I was specifically referencing elite public schools,the Great Nine, the Etons, Harrows, Winchesters, Shrewsburys, Charterhouse etc, not just any selective independent. As alluded to in my original post you are paying for way more then just academic excellence and good facilities, you are paying entry fee into the top strata of society.

Don't be silly.

How about recognition that it's best for the country to get the best kids educated to the max regardless of background

Exactly, have you not got that from any of my posts? I’m arguing that background is irrelevant and should not be used as a discriminatory factor for entrance to universities . I was under the impression you were arguing for the opposite?
Have you changed your mind or have I just miss understood your posts?

That was the later Blair/Brown years, because it was running in 2007/2008 ish.

It definitely offered real opportunities for increased breadth, but it would have needed to be offered consistently year after year to have any chance of bridging the gap between people whose home circumstances facilitated high levels of cultural capital and those where it didn't. Be that via private school or some other route.

Having read the full thread, I wonder if it was a mistake to do away with the assisted place scheme.

Contextual offers support that aim, provided that they can be objectively justified, e.g. by statistics. When 29% of private school kids achieve what 19% of state kids achieve, that's not going to be because the private kids are smarter, unless the private schools are using entrance exams. An interesting comparison would be selective state versus selective private.

State education in this country is a postcode lottery, so background absolutely can and does hold bright kids back. Contextual offers make an attempt to correct for that.

If the idea is that university entrance is regardless of background then why would statistics showing what school a student went to justify using contextual offers ? That’s literally basing entrance criteria on background. Do you get why this is coming across as contradictory?