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.

Only just managed to revisit this thread but contextual offers (which, as discussed up-thread aren't relevant to Oxbridge anyway) aren't purely offered based on ethnicity but alongside other socio-economic factors e.g. someone being a young carer or care leaver, FSM etc all of which have a much wider impact on a young person's education. In answer to your question, no I do not think that is a form of discrimination.

And I wasn't talking about the Guardian article - this story has been covered by all the main newspapers. My comments were in response to what Trinity is doing, which I think is a step backwards though, as I said in my first post, I can see why it is happening and a huge amount of it it down to funding in schools.

There are some really interesting and nuanced posts on here and I will try to find time to read the thread in full because it's been very informative. It's a complicated issue and while I absolutely do not believe that students from private schools are disadvantaged in the admissions system (quite the opposite in fact), or that they aren't applying (29% of student intake to Cambridge last year came from private schools), I can see from what people in these institutions have written upthread that none of the approaches to widening access has been perfect and more work is needed. I genuinely believe universities are working hard at this.

Dismissing concerns about inequality and attempts at widening access as 'left wing nonsense' lowers the tone of the discussion.

@Araminta1003 The way you talk about people as 'Northern Socialists' (how on earth do you know where people are from?) and people 'on benefits' is really offensive. Why on earth do you assume that people 'on benefits' don't read to their children? And why are you so terribly angry and bitter about the idea of the state intervening to improve the lives of its citizens? You say there is 'no money,' to do this - that's what the vat policy was about. Your solution is middle-class yummy-mummies going online to do a bit of reading with the poor, deprived northern benefit-children. Yes, I don't think that's going to cut it when it comes to social mobility somehow. Thanks for the offer though.

@januarybikethief that's fine but it does still leave the question as to why it is that small group of very highly prestigious schools that have been targeted.

“Wouldn't that make a mockery of the entire Oxbridge ethos, which is that passion and aptitude for one's chosen subject the main factor that makes successful candidates stand out from the others?”

@pinotnow - I don’t think so. A lot of Oxbridge candidates are polymaths. Strings of 9s in all subjects. And there is overlap. If I look at all the top musicians in our grammar school who are in the national youth orchestra, they could be excellent lawyers too, one excels at classics, another at history etc
DD’s friends in year 12 who will be strong candidates are still choosing between PPE, Histiory or Law with a language at Oxford. They have been reading widely across disciplines for years and some are in political parties already. Some have won national debating competitions etc I assume same is the case in private schools and the large selective comprehensives in London.

@pinotnow - the going into school to read with children has massive long term outcomes - which you should know if you are a teacher! Nothing wrong with middle class mummies and their diction either. It you want improvement in cultural capital, you need to take every offer of help. Funny how all the head teachers in London seem to grasp this simple concept.

@Araminta1003 going into school to read with children has massive long term outcomes
Does it? What is the evidence for the long term impact of parent volunteers reading with children in schools? Obviously it's a lovely thing to do (I thought you said online originally though?) but I don't think that on its own it has a significant impact on outcomes for those children.

Nothing wrong with middle class mummies and their diction either

Nothing wrong with northern (or Welsh/Scottish/Midlands/South Western etc etc) mummies and their accents, either. Are you suggesting cultural capital is improved by listening to an RP accent for 15 minutes once a week?!

A lot of Oxbridge candidates are polymaths. Strings of 9s in all subjects

Yes, that describes my ds, and most of his cohort I should imagine, and of course many of these students will have varied interests and will read widely and participate in a range of extra-curriculars and societies outside of their disciplines, and of course there are overlaps. But passion for their subject seems to me (albeit I'm very much an outsider) a crucial part of the Oxbridge experience, especially from an admissions perspective. Certainly it was the main focus of the open day we attended and of a lot of the information about admissions online. That said, I have no doubt that the majority of the applicants would do well in other related subjects as well as their own, and ds has mentioned that several of the overseas students he knows are doing courses (law and stem) that are the only ones their parents would consider funding. But surely, especially in arts and humanities subjects, it's most rewarding for all concerned when there is real intellectual excitement about what is being studied? In the example you gave (someone switching from econ to history) it's hard to believe the history department is going to benefit massively from an influx of frustrated economists etc, capable as those students may be.

My mouth also fell open at @OhDear111 's second paragraph. If it's not clear from what I have said already, let me be explicit that I certainly wouldn't make those correlations. I also don't dismiss questions of inequality and access initiatives as 'left wing nonsense'. I think we need to work towards a solution. The answer isn't that the universities should pay for it all though.

For what it's worth, I think that the contextual offer thing is actually a bit of a red herring and I'm actually not too hung up about giving lower offers to some children but expecting those from schools where everyone gets all 9s to do likewise. We don't do it at Oxbridge but I think it's actually a pretty reasonable thing to do. But the point is, A Level grades are just not a good indicator of whether someone is going to do well at Oxbridge. The A Level material is pretty basic/thin and doesn't prepare you well for the tripos. All the students I have talked about have all got all 9s - and yet in the cases of many of them, their writing, though full of 'info' is poorly structured and boring.

That's why we interview - and in the past it would weed these candidates out. But the standards have dropped so much, especially due to large classes/low resources (and consequent lack of exposure/need to speak and argue in front of others, and lack of teacher marking of essays) and the impact of smartphones on attention span and wide reading. So even with interviews, we're just not getting the same calibre anymore.

I think it's worth remembering that in the majority, we are not talking about brilliant rough diamond kids from terribly poor households on benefits. There are a few, and I would love there to be more. Kids from that background who are truly brilliant could get great scholarships at top schools and be set up for life (I've helped a number do this). I have had a few those in the past and am supervising one now. Far more usual are the upper working/middle class kids who are usually top of their school, get all As (because it's really not that uncommon or hard if you are averagely clever and work hard) but just don't write very interestingly because you don't have the cultural capital. I know what I describe above about what we expect in essays sounds like silly History Boys rhetoric, but it's true. And it's actually a very useful skill (though sadly also sets people up to be duplicitous Boris Johnson-types).

@harrietm87 - you came up to Cambridge around the same time I did. I too was a state school student who got a first (in part by intentionally aping the style of the public school kids). You'll have to believe me when I say the standards have dropped dramatically since then, and the gap has widened by miles. It's very sad.

(Incidentally, I have a slight sense that some of what I say above might be a bit contradictory, but I can't quite pin down where. If anyone can, then please let me know!)

So what can be done? Well, @pinotnow says that I imply 'there's no points doing any of it anyway'. That's not what I am saying and really does, I'm afraid, amount to the sort of reductive argumentation I see in so many of these students ("You point out a problem with something and therefore don't believe in its value at all"). This thread was about why Tit Hall want to attract students in specific subjects which are offered at a subset of schools (thank you Rachel Reeves). I simply set out reasons why the College would reasonably want to do this, in order to maintain (or build up) standards. It doesn't preclude the College also running all sorts of worthwhile access schemes and foundation programmes. But in reality the children need a lot more.

If this country is really serious about getting bright state school kids to thrive and flourish at Oxbridge, it needs to set up gifted and talented schemes all over the country, in schools and at weekends, taking children to huge amounts of theatre, music and art, providing music lessons in multiple instruments, plus ensembles and opportunities to be in local drama, etc. In some cases, additional help would be required on top of that for those who might have trouble accessing them at all because of, inter alia, caring responsibilities, disability or mental health problems, gang membership, the need to work as a teenager to bring money in. It would probably be cheaper to pay for them to go to public schools tbh. This would be the absolute gold standard, Rolls Royce access scheme.

I can see why the government doesn't choose to prioritise this when it needs to spend money on getting the general standards up. In this city (the most unequal in the UK - though I know it happens across the country), schools are rightly focusing on the whole pupil body, not just the few who given the right help, might get to Oxbridge. This means, for example, implementing 'proportional setting' to ensure that there is always a 40% proportion of disadvantaged pupils in every set (and they don't all just end up in the lower set). This is really good for those 40%, but can be disastrous for the rest of the set. Now, that might absolutely still be the right thing to do for the school, and the Sutton Trust work is all about raising the general standard a bit. But to improve the issue we've been talking about at Oxbridge, what is required is to not touch the lowest students at all, and rather plough resources into raising the standard of a few by a lot. This is what Oxbridge would want, but is it a good use of public funds, which should be spread out more widely to create broader but more incremental improvements?

In any case, none of this is the job of universities (or universities alone) any more than the Royal College of Music is responsible for the fact that their intake of brilliant musicians is mostly not from the poorest families in the country. That isn't defeatist; it's realistic.

So what can be done, if not the gold-standard access initiatives that I set out above? Probably something like a set of 6 week summer/holiday programmes starting when children are, say, Year 7, and requiring them to sign up for a minimum number? With all the extra additional help for those needing it to access it? Funded jointly between the government, universities and charities...?

Who's up for helping me set up a pilot scheme? Not only designing the curriculum, but creating assessment criteria, getting the funding in, persuading the government to give non-existent funding to something that would be political suicide (not raising general standards but helping kids get into Oxbridge), liaising with schools and authorities to identify families, managing the safeguarding and risk assessments, setting standards and deciding what to do if children drop out/don't turn up, employing teachers and mentors, funding and engaging stand-in carers for those families where the child is the carer.

@pinotnow it’s obvious that the issue is finding academically able students who want to study a handful of less attractive subjects. The Guardian chose to go with the angle of state v private (& cherry pick quotes) because that suits its agenda and lots of posters on this thread followed their lead for the same reason.

They cld have chosen to go with “it’s outrageous that state school pupils aren’t being offered a deep education in music/the classics/MFL” or “why do Oxbridge still offer these archaic subjects when the govt priority is STEM and that’s what most pupils want to study” or even “TH targets schools where pupils study the subjects they offer degrees in”. Of course one of the 1st things Bridget Phillipson did was end the extra funding for classics in state schools and take MFL out of the EBAC measure for state schools. Why blame Oxbridge for looking for students in these subjects from schools that do teach them?

I have some knowledge of the situation with classics where students without Latin or Greek are given places and then have intensive language classes in the 1st year to try to catch up. They never do (despite being v bright) and spend their degree studying the classics from translations. It’s a valid way of studying but it is not a degree in the Greats - and as noted above is not how Dons what to spend their tutorials/supervisions.

It’s a shame classics isn’t more popular. It is in fact a fabulous discipline for AI, linguistics, computing and of course law.

Perhaps Oxbridge shld operate a free market in its subjects - increasing those where there is excess demand and reducing those where there isn’t - so that the offer rates are the same across all subjects and schools. Other universities, not so financially secure, have had to consider this. Is that what people want?

edited for SPAG

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.

Yes indeed but there will be quite a number of former students even from just 9 schools and you said your massive sense of entitlement that has been nurtured since birth prevents you from working in a normal career, you don’t need a job as such. it is something you do because your folks organised some soft position somewhere that has zero accountability and allows you to perfect the skill of falling upwards no matter how much you fuck up.

I’m wondering where all these positions are from which these poshos can’t be sacked. You’re obviously well informed on the subject - can you give some examples of businesses and companies which offer these non-jobs?

@Notanorthener I read Classics (course IIA for anyone who knows the system!) with a grade A GCSE in Latin (which I’d largely self-taught in a year) and no Ancient Greek.

It’s a four year course and I had daily language classes in first and third year (when I started learning Greek). It was definitely intense but I was fully capable of reading untranslated texts in Latin by the time I did Mods and in Greek by the time I did Greats - although my Greek is definitely not as strong as my Latin even now.

If students are failing to reach the required standard after a foundation year, there’s either an issue with the quality of teaching/course structure, or their dedication to studying, or perhaps both.

I wouldn't call music or MFL archaic subjects. Classics possibly, although obviously there are huge benefits to studying classics and it would be beyond a huge shame if they were to die out.

I will say in my leafy part of London, it's well known that classics is pretty much a free pass into Oxbridge - this for both private and state pupils. I know a few kids who got in via that route and then immediately switched to more mainstream subjects after they arrived, which must be hugely galling for the classics faculty. Ditto I know someone who did the same with music. It will be fascinating to see how this alters admissions stats for Tit Hall, if they'll next year be inundated with suddenly super-keen classicists, who don't care what they study so long as they get Oxbridge on their CVS.

Yes they are. There is an article in the Times about it. There are complaints in Cambridge regarding the simplistic adjustments being made for admissions. imo that is stupidity; Trinity Hall won’t be the last college doing this kind of approach.

N is for normal, and is below the A level in terms of rigor/difficulty

I have some knowledge of the situation with classics where students without Latin or Greek are given places and then have intensive language classes in the 1st year to try to catch up. They never do (despite being v bright) and spend their degree studying the classics from translations. It’s a valid way of studying but it is not a degree in the Greats - and as noted above is not how Dons what to spend their tutorials/supervisions.

It’s a shame classics isn’t more popular. It is in fact a fabulous discipline for AI, linguistics, computing and of course law.

Agreed. I have the great good fortune to have a Classics degree. Back in the 1980s it was a very well regarded subject and I had no trouble getting a good job. Of course graduates were few in number back then.

My university was already finding by the late 1970s that they could not fill the places unless they accepted students who didn't have Greek A level, because so few schools offered it by then. About half my year therefore arrived with Latin A level and either no Greek or O level Greek only. The complete beginners did an intensive course in the first year which they had to pass to proceed to a Classics degree. Some decided around this time that they would be happy with a degree in Latin with Greek and did no further Greek language options. Those who did want a full Classics degree had to take an intermediate Greek course in the second year and pass the compulsory Greek translation paper either in year 2, when the rest of us took it, or alongside their finals papers at the end of year 3. It was very tough. An exceptionally bright student in my year who ultimately got a First (and they weren't handed out like sweeties back then) failed the translation paper at the first attempt and had to re-take it.

My impression was that it made an enormous difference that all these students did have Latin A level. If they had arrived with no Latin either they would have had to work like Trojans (ha) to reach Honours standard in both languages in three years from a standing start. Just getting to grips with the fact that both Latin and Greek are inflected languages would have taken time. I was exceptionally fortunate that when I started my degree I had six years of Latin and four years of Greek under my belt.

Nowadays Classics departments have had to accept that they won't get that many students who have ever studied Latin or Greek. It must be a totally different experience. Universities can't even rely on students with modern language GCSE to have learned much grammar if my children's experience is anything to go by (many years ago now, admittedly).

I'm not sure about the proportions thing. After all, I doubt you proportionally admit students from grammar schools vs non-grammar schools, and not every grammar school student is a genius, either.

I'm sorry my argument hasn't been up to standard, @cantabsupervisor , thank goodness I'm not one of your students, eh?😂. I was really responding to comments you made that did seem to strongly imply that there was no point in trying anything. You said state school kids never turned out to be bright enough and that intervention programmes and workshops etc were pointless unless the students were 'living and breathing' the content, and not just attending sessions at weekends. That did convey a strong sense of its being a futile endeavour to me.

In this post you appear to have changed tack and have set out in great detail exactly what would be required to get an effective scheme in place. Presumably we are supposed to draw the conclusion that the challenges are insurmountable and far too costly to even attempt. Which leaves us where? Not bothering presumably, albeit while feeling terribly sad about it.

I do think it's worth us questioning the value cultural capital of the kind you describe holds in certain circles. You say yourself it can lead to people developing a superficial kind of intellect that amounts to little more than a glossy facade, a la Boris Johnson. While students who don't have access to this pool of knowledge to enhance their essays may produce essays that bore you, does that really reflect the sum of their ability and demonstrate that they are incapable of excelling on these degrees? I don't know, but I do think it is worth considering that if we insist that people are not clever enough for Oxbridge unless they have spent hours on end in theatres/galleries/museums etc etc we are at risk of sidelining huge numbers of highly capable and talented young people who just don't come from the right kinds of backgrounds in favour of polished individuals who do.

A lot of what is needed to get the necessary “cultural capital” that is being described is free - all of the world’s greatest literature can be borrowed from a library or even downloaded free on a Kindle. You do not need to have seen great art or great theatre or heard great music in person to learn about it - the internet/books/tv and recordings will get you very far. Radio 4, the broadsheets, the news are all accessible to pretty much everyone and certainly not the preserve of the privately educated.

The problem, I think, is that the importance of almost all of these are increasingly being devalued in our society, due to a combination of factors including school priorities and resources, cost of living forcing people and institutions to cut back on what is seen as non-essential expenditure on the arts, and that plus degree costs meaning students are being encouraged to choose degree courses that are more directly vocational or likely to be lucrative, plus technology causing a massively reduced attention span for things that require deeper thought and engagement.

It is extremely depressing and I don’t know what the solution is!

I’m such a Northern working class peasant (although not particularly a socialist one given I work in the City earning 6 figures despite being one of those state school students that turned out not to be that brilliant after all) that I had to Google ‘cultural capital’ to make sure that my understanding was correct and when I did, I found this interesting blog post from KCL on the topic:

https://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/behaviouralinsights/2020/10/08/why-social-capital-and-belonging-are-interlinked-the-importance-of-cultural-capital/#:~:text=The%20idea%20of%20'cultural%20capital',valued%20by%20society%20than%20others.

Worth a read. If any middle class yummy-mummies with RP accents would like to read it to me, I’m sure it’ll benefit my development assimilation.

Edit: yes I am being slightly tongue in cheek but the use of humour is probably another clue to my Northern roots.

Music and MFL degrees just been dropped entirely from dds top 5 RG university 😢.

Agree so much about cultural capital. We are both readers so our dds are too - we go to the theatre art galleries etc with them and always have as we genuinely enjoy them. We talk about books and ideas all the time with our teens. They and we think this is normal but we are viewed with gentle amusement by literally all the other families we know (their kids at state and private) who never do this and certainly not with their teens.

"Presumably we are supposed to draw the conclusion that the challenges are insurmountable and far too costly to even attempt. Which leaves us where? Not bothering presumably, albeit while feeling terribly sad about it."

Well, I set out what would be the gold standard of access provision over 15 years and then at the end say that if we can't do that, shall we opt for some summer schools, and would anyone like to help me design a pilot? I'm not sure how that amounts to implying it's not worth bothering. I should apologise for the word 'never'. Reading my posts in the round, however, I can see I did also say that "99% of the time, my very top undergraduates were always from indy schools and 99% of the time, my struggling ones were always from state schools" and "there are state-school exceptions here. But there were far more exceptions twenty years ago. I have not come across an 'exceptional' non-grammar kid for a long time now." I also set out how much I enjoy teaching the few brilliant rough diamonds and would like more, and asked whether anyone would like to join with me to help set some access work up. So I can only apologise if all of that came across as hard right screw-the-poor doctrine.

"I do think it's worth us questioning the value cultural capital of the kind you describe holds in certain circles...does that really reflect the sum of their ability and demonstrate that they are incapable of excelling on these degrees?"

Indeed, very worth questioning (which if you look back, I did in my original post - "In which case, Oxbridge might want to redesign what it's here to do"). But if that isn't going to happen (and that's not what the original Guardian article is about), then I was simply saying that I entirely understand why Trinity Hall has done what it's done, because it's not getting what it needs right now.

I'm simply saying that state education alone doesn't prepare students to excel in the Oxbridge system, so Oxbridge need to work out how to get the right students in that will excel in the system. That will be through a combination of helping state students in advance, or in the admissions process, or by targeting students (mostly indy) who have been prepared to excel. But it's only the last of these three that people seem to have a problem with. When in fact, the last has the greatest 'success' rate in terms of final results in Oxbridge (which again, you might want to change), and the first two are more hit-or-miss. Doesn't mean we shouldn't do them, or seek to improve them. But to bring them up to the same success rate as the third will be v v resource heavy. It's probably easier, as you say, to change the criteria of success, which you think is 'superficial'. I actually think is quite clever and useful (I use these skills all the time), quite 'fun' for the weird, quirkly, intellectually curious types (which don't include tim-nice-but-dim from a minor non-academic public school), but sadly can be turned by devious talker types like Johnson. We have a raft of RG universities offering that stuff, so there is a place for Oxbridge offering and requiring something different.

The offer to collaborate on access initiatives still stands btw!

100%. This country is wildly anti-intellectual. I thought to add this to an earlier post, but thought it would be distracting and I would get shot down!

Personally I’m not why a particular group of fee paying schools who already send large numbers to Oxbridge need to be targeted? Surely with their considerable experience at supporting kids to apply successfully to universities, the staff at these schools are acutely aware that it’s statistically easier to get in for certain subjects, and will be sharing this information widely. Should the message not be spread more widely amongst highly achieving pupils from all sectors that Oxbridge is currently far more accessible than you might think if you pick one of these routes?

Like others, I think the real issue is the fact that MFL/Music/Classics are no longer attractive A level subjects for the vast majority of pupils from either sector. As an example Westminster School last year had 156 pupils take maths A level, 75 for physics and 70 for Economics. They had 5 pupils take music. I don’t know what we do about this - it’s understandable that pupils from both sectors want to take degrees that rightly or wrongly are more valued in the workplace.

I am also interested to hear on this thread that admissions tutors report no independent school applicants at all for their subject. This doesn’t reflect my (northern socialist) DC’s experience as a current Oxbridge undergraduate in one of these degree courses being discussed.

I think it’s a combination of further education now being paid for by the students and parents so they want subjects / degrees that have a clearer lucrative path (computer science / economics / law etc) . Coupled with a general anti intellectualism fuelled by social media perhaps and general dumbing down. So the gulf gets wider between state and private?

Dd2 doing German and classics at a state 6th form (full of private school transfers). Both courses have only 5/6 pupils.

@TheaBrandt1 I think you are correct. Also learning a musical instrument and reading music takes practice. MFLs and classical languages require rote learning and application together with practice if you can get it. Lots of subjects are structured differently to this and how many times do you read on MN that dc cannot learn a MFL and are desperate to drop it? It seems we want instant results and this actually masks the fact that some grade A students are not actually that bright. 40 plus years ago they were.

I hate to devalue effort but I’m 50 and I could still reel off the names of those that got all As at A level in my year. There were about 2 or 3 in a year. Now so many of my friends teens get these stellar results all As is almost normal. Must be difficult to weed out the properly exceptional ones without an in depth interview.

We do, actually. We get comparatively few grammar applicants, and most of our applicants now are from lower-ranking comprehensives. We regularly make offers to a year group which will be all state comprehensive or comprehensive-equivalent (this includes academy comps and VII form colleges). But these candidates also do not often have “strings of 9s”, which is actually much rarer than people on this thread seem to think.