@returntomotherlandI find your comment interesting, and I think it’s perhaps the assumption that the qualities which secure someone a place at Oxbridge are necessarily a reflection of innate ability that I would push back on.
I say this as an Oxbridge reject from over 25 years ago.
I was the child of immigrants, brought up in a very working-class household in a deprived part of the country. My parents were barely literate, and I attended a local comprehensive. We are also not white and I could not speak English until I started school. I applied to Oxbridge entirely off my own back, with no real guidance or preparation for what a law interview might involve.
I remember how much more prepared some of the other applicants seemed. Not necessarily more intelligent, but certainly more comfortable in that environment. They seemed to understand things that I simply didn’t know I needed to understand.
I went on to study law at a Russell Group university, but I think that lack of social and cultural capital continued to follow me. There were so many things, looking back, that I just wasn’t equipped for. Even relatively simple things like having the right clothes for interviews, knowing how to present myself, or feeling comfortable around people who had grown up in very different circumstances.
And despite doing all the things I thought I should be doing, attending law fairs, researching careers and so on, I never quite felt that I fitted in.
But I think there’s an important distinction here. Not fitting in didn’t mean I wasn’t intellectually capable of being there. It meant I was trying to navigate an environment where so much of what was expected seemed to be understood by others almost instinctively. I was having to work things out as I went along, often without even knowing what I didn’t know.
What’s interesting to me now is seeing this from the other side, as a parent.
My daughter is 15 and attends a prestigious independent day school. Through her sport, she already has friends at some very prestigious boarding schools, and we’ve recently been discussing whether she might like to attend one for sixth form.
She has a confidence about entering those environments that I simply didn’t have at her age.
But it’s also the conversations we have at home. Just the other day, I was in the car with two of my children, and we somehow ended up having quite a deep conversation about identity, belonging, how we present ourselves, the people we gravitate towards (and them towards us) and the sort of person we want to become. We laughed afterwards about how quickly we’d gone from an ordinary car journey to something rather philosophical.
And it struck me that these are conversations I never had growing up.
Not because my parents didn’t care, but because their own experiences and circumstances were so different.
I can see how much my children are absorbing, almost without realising it, and how that shapes their confidence, their self-awareness and their ability to navigate the world. They are growing up with a sense of possibility and belonging that I had to work much harder to develop.
And I think this is where your argument troubles me a little.
I don’t doubt that many Oxbridge graduates are exceptionally intelligent, hardworking and impressive. Nor do I doubt that your chambers genuinely operates a university-blind process.
But being university-blind doesn’t necessarily mean that the process is blind to the advantages that helped shape the candidate sitting in front of you.
Confidence, articulacy, ease in an interview and even the ability to demonstrate intellectual ability in a particular way can all be influenced by parenting, schooling and the environments we’ve grown up in.
And I wonder whether, sometimes, we mistake someone’s ability to demonstrate their intelligence in a way that feels familiar and impressive to us for a measure of their underlying intellectual potential.
Because there is a difference between not having the ability and not having had the same opportunities to develop or demonstrate it.
So my question really is this: how does your chambers distinguish between someone who is exceptionally able and someone who is exceptionally able but has also benefited from years of preparation, encouragement and exposure to the sorts of environments in which they are now being assessed?
And perhaps more importantly, how do you recognise that same intellectual potential in someone who hasn’t had those advantages?
Because I do wonder how many genuinely bright people are lost to professions like the Bar, not because they lack the intellectual ability, but because they never quite acquire the confidence, knowledge or social capital to make that ability visible in the way these institutions recognise.
And that, I think, is how a profession can continue to reproduce a particular type of candidate, even when nobody involved consciously intends to do so.