What does everyone think about the new 'declare your parents education' UCAS rule?

[NotanOtter]

Seems a heap of proverbial to me....

I'm sure when I applied in 1986 we had to put our parent's occupations on the form. I don't remember having to state their educational background though.

awww bugsy i applied then too!

I think they should just base it on the individual who is going, regardless of who their parents are or what they do.

I also think that the means testing for loans and paying fees shouldn't be based on parents income.

Seems such a loooooooooooong time ago now doesn't it Notanotter? Was all so exciting though, felt like the start of my life.

Bugsy has had too much wine & should go to bed, before she slips into old woman's reminissing (which she can't spell!).

i want to say its great - positive discrimination and all that. but i dislike positive discrimination.

personally. i find it difficult to imagine coming from the bones of my arse to get a uni ed, that my daughter will be discriminated against.

and i wonder if they have a checking facility - what if the kid says nah my mums an underpaid drone"

how ..would..they..check...all... the apps?

i think i will encourage her to lie.

Overseas students are dealt with sepraately as a revenue stream but they have to be reasonably up to the academic standard. I did wonder if a parent in the UK could buy a £15k Oxbridge place as an over seas place for a child with say ABB.

We are already the most spied upon people in the western world. What we are going to see, shortly is a little bit of an arms race. As people here have already suggested, the rational course is to lie.
Blairism is not not purely down to him, that's the way both parties think now. Thus the next stage will be formal declariations and checking out the statements.
Give it a couple of years, and the identity card will allow then to look up parental tax records.
It's not that hard to link this on to the council tax band of your house, and the ofsted grading of your school.
You thought that field on the census report where it asked your religion was a harmless thing ?
Oh how we laughed.

When I went up, you could claim whatever A levels you liked, which led to surprisnigly little fraud, but enough that it was changing by that time.
The authorities smelt a big far rat when they discovered my name had different spellings on my birth certificate and application form...

We already see this sort of thing happening with schools. People are pretending to live within catchments, and falsely claiming religion.
Schools have responded by doing checks, and the government will bakc them to the hilt in getting records. A couple of years I was part of a lobby that stalled that for a while. We don't expect to win in the long term, active countermeasures will be along shortly.

More shite from the labour party, do they ever stop. Neither myself or my husband went to university but we are doing very well thank you so where do my kids fit in?

Note - the care and parent ed questions 'will be optional'....so don't complete them....

MuminBrum, you're very sweet, but actually I know all that, I work for the govt

Which is why I know that some questions are asked for different purposes than is pretended.

I have no issue with questions being asked of someone about themselves, I just think its insidious to get info about other people.

I'm not agitated btw its a point of view I've always held re state interference.

under priveledged background or not if you are bright you will succeed, surely the point is to have students that will get a degree, and contribute to our future. I would not want to be accepted on a ciurse as a studnet who wasnt good enough, but was poor enough. As for info on parents it is pants.....and intrusive,

i need to do a degree in typing , this standard will probably be accepted with my background

Hello? I seem to have become invisible.

I'll just say it one more time before I go... This will not mean that the children of rich and/or well-educated parents will be turned away from universities in their droves.

(Oh, and differentiated offers based on type of school attended and predicted grades are already commonplace, so I don't think that what it's suggesting is even anything new.)

I' with CAM, having written some of the databases the government uses...
2ndhandrose is in danger of looking naive if she thinks this is a purely Labour thing. The difference is honesty.
Thatcher Tories would have been loud about the "hard line" they are taking against bad people.
Blair lies about the true purpose of ID cards et al, and has a stereotypical artsgrad naivety about technology, which is of course why he fell for the US "technical intelligence" over Iraq.
Cameron won't be any better, and will simply put higher quality spin on it.

Ironically the ID card itself is very unlikely to work. The thing that the government/civil service wants is what we techies call a "primary key". Currently it is not possible for the government to join up databases because you can't say that Joe Bloggs you find in databae A is the same one in database B. There will be several people called Joe Bloggs, and it's far from unknown for the DB to contain a Joseph Bloggs who is "really" one of the others.
There are more NI numbers than people by a vast margin.

ellbell. The mn bell tolls - time to give up. You must embrace being ignored, it's good for you.

My child, my child will be discriminated against, it's criminal.

Well I've never mentioned to my children that I was the first one in my family to get a degree either. And they need never know...

Ellbell, it's all very well saying this is what is going to be done with the data now, but what's to stop in the future, people looking at the background of a candidate and saying: this person has no family support and what with fees being high and having no academic background, they'll probably drop out... let's not accept them.

Times change and fashions change and if this question becomes the norm, who is to say what people in the future will do with the information.

IMO the way to deal with poor people not going to university, is to stop charging them fees, give them proper grants and a proper education system so that the school they go to (any school) provides them with the education needed to get to university.

God what a load of bollocks. I agree, it's just another sneaky way to get info on us.

It really feels to me like no matter how hard you try in life, no matter how much you pull yourself up, you're always going to get knocked down again - penalised. It's a pile of crap.

The Telegraph p14 says given the average A level grades at Durham are AAA things like your music exam grades can sway things. So if my chilren have 3 grade 8s that might help over someone who has no grades that give UCAS points. If that is so then it might cancel out the parents been to university demerit point I suppose and yet your chances of playing a music instrument to grade 8 are probably a lot higher in private schools/parents been to university situations than the average state school. Perhaps they should be looking at removing UCAS points for anything other than A levels.

It also say Oxford is extending its entrance tests now to subjects like English to help distinguish AAA candidates.

Is that right about music exam grades? That seems wrong to me, given the cost of music tuition and instrument hire, not to mention the logistics of organising a child to keep up music tuition and practice.

I've just been reminded that until somewhere in the 1980s you had to put your father's occupation on your university application.
Presumably for the opposite reason...

DC, yes, on one of the links below I think it refers to that going on and then Cambridge saying take it off because otherwise tutors might say - father embassador, doctor etc put on good pile, father dustman, reject. Now in the Communist Republic of Blair we go the other way.

Yes most good universities just go by A level grades and your personal statement and what the school says about you. The better schools would never ruin their reputation for honesty on the forms with universities by making things up etc. But you can get UCAS points which even on my daugther's post degree job appliations were added up for music exams grade 6 and above only, not lower grades and more points for distinction than merit than pass. It was introduced so that rubbishy sort of qualifiations like lesser grade stuff, can't remember the names, GNVQs or whatever could be counted as well and some of the not so good universities will be looking at those kinds of things anyway as many applications may not have come via the A level route at all.

For the 3 children now at university I had to get out all their music certificates in every subject to get the information. Possibly drama certs at high grades count too - it is all on the UCAS web site.

LOL pointydog! I thought^ I was being reassuring, but I can see now that that's not the point.

(However, I'm not worried about the fate of my kids, who have two PhD-ed parents... and four grandparents without an educational qualification between them!)

Caligula, point taken. But ime the admissions officers will be thinking the exact opposite. I can only talk about my own experience, but for the people I know widening participation is not about tokenism or box-ticking. It is about a real desire to broaden access. I don't think I live in cloud-cuckoo land, but of course it is always a possibility!

Oh, and btw I totally agree about fees.

Universities want the brightest pupils so I'm sure they do what they can to get them. If you only recruit from a few schools you reduce the quality of your undergraduates. BUT if someone is a bit thick genetically and their parents were and trie dnad failed to get to univesrity that does kind of carry on through (e.g. Princess Diana and her second son etc) and it's not an opportunity thing always. Sometimes it's genetic and no amount of preference for those whose parents didn't go to univesrity will help some children into university.

I'm all for broadening access, went to a crap school from a poor family. The tory run local council really didn't see the point in spending money on people like me, and certainly didn't like science at all.
But I fail to see what that has to do with universities ? To say that universities take on too many people from state schools is like saying the NHS is biased because too many patients smoke.
The state of many state schools is shameful, yes of course private education has more resources, but that does not excuse the common practice in state schools of having totally unqualified people teaching maths and science.

To me the difference is between lefties who say good schools are unfair, and me who says that it's poor schools that do the damage.