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

[NotanOtter]

Seems a heap of proverbial to me....

Well ours were told at some pretty good schools to mention the subject and I heard a talk at one of the schools from an admissions tutor from a univesrity and he did say they liked to see something relevant to the subject on the personal statement.

The getting up at dawn to deal with horses and their excrement etc might mean you are disciplined and can turn up at lectures on time, perhaps. But I think it's a huge exercise as someone said below to assess people and I'm sure the main thing is rightly the grades.

I've hired people sometimes because they have overcome serious hurdles to get where they are.
But I only did that because I knew their personal situation, one was in such a fix that he appeared in the press as a sad case. Another overcame both agrophobia and claustrophobia to be put in a situation where large men shouted at him.
Wasn't charity or political correctness, I needed people who had a serious ability to cope with whatever came their way.

But university admissions tutors don't have that detailed information, or at least the data is so vast they can't possibly be expected to assimilate it.
Are all graduates equal ?
Obviously not, but imagine the fun comparing the value to a child's upbringing of a history degree to one in French. Does that help a kid doing science ? Different points for grads of different universities ?

Nursing has been moved to a profession with many graduates in it, does that count ? How much ?
About 2-3 % of kids did degrees when I went up. We're now close to 50%. It follows that many grads don't really do jobs that require a degree. More points or less ?

That's just a skim, loads more factors...

What we will get is box ticking and very simplistic computer programs. Badly written and very scary programs.
My favourite was a program that was found to actively discriminate both on the grounds of race and religion. The techies got it in the neck for that. Except...
The system had been calibrated on real applicaitons data. They showed that it exactly mirrored what the staff were doing ;)

"What we will get is box ticking and very simplistic computer programs. Badly written and very scary programs. "

I agree DC.
Also we will get targets.

In the link I posted below my old supervisor at Cambridge argues that it won't really make any difference because the academics only care about taking the best people.
I think she's viewing the world through Gothic windows (as my dh put it) - at the non-Oxbridge universities we will be under a lot of pressure from management to meet targets and the administrators may not handle that very intelligently.

Yes, if the result is you get £X funding if you have X% of children from bad comprehensives then you will tend to that. When my son went through clearing last summer it was interesting looking at all the places which still had places where you really didnt' have to get much in terms of A levels at all to get in, all over the country. Those institutions just wanted people to fill seats to get money.

Also loads of secretaries in London who might as well have started work at 16 after 2 years of typing courses do a French or whatever degree and then become a typist at 22 with £20k of student debt. If it's given them the chance to grow up,leave home, have fun, mature, mix with other people and decide what they want to do then that's fine and it might keep people off the dole queues for 3 years too but you do wonder what's the point. My mother did 2 years teacher training certificate from age 17 - 19 and I think she was as good an infant school teacher as had she done A levels and then a 3 year degree and one year PGCE.

Depends, doesn't it, on whether you ONLY do a degree as a way of getting a job, or whether, you see it as an end in itself... the beauty of learning for its own sake, knowledge as a valuable goal in its own right, etc. etc. etc.

There is an argument that the state fails many pupils. If I hired a firm of builders who bollixed up my new extension because "shortages" meant they had used a media studies graduate rather than a City & Guilds qualified builder I could sue their arsess big time.
If one of their staff stopped the others doing their job properly, it would not be an excuse

If a state school gets a PE teacher to run maths
for it's kids for enough time to do serious damage, or puts disruptive kids into mainstream classes to save money, there is no comeback.

You could therefore argue that the state should pay compensation for poor education, and that it's standards count as advertising whereby we pay taxes, for a service that it doesn't bother to provide to the standard it says it will.

Under that logic kids from broken schools should be compensated by giving the university that attempts to undo the damage more money.
To an extent that happens already. State funds are used at universities to run remedial courses in many science subjects because so many British kids turn up with substandard education because the science A levels have been dumbed down so far that sometimes you can't tell someone with a physics A level apart from one with French.

If we only had private schools with parents paying by voucher or indeed cash then they would be payers and able to enforce things better.

Interesting to see the impact on this on universities. When it was "free" in my day less easy to say not getting enough teaching for our money. My older children paying £1,200 a year might have more leverage. Their brother paying £3k might have even more if not given enough lectures a week, not that he would mind about that. Daughter 1 going to start a course with £10,600 a year fees perhaps gets the best service of all.

haven't got time to read all of this but my immediate reaction is that this is the latest of a series of measures aimed at addressing symptoms rather than causes. imho tehre should be much more onus on schools that are failing their pupils than on universities to lower their expectations. i know it's not quite as simple as that - but it annoys me immensely that the whole debate about entry into university focuses on the relationship between A level results and univeristy entry standards, rather than looking at the mere 14-15 years of education prior to that.

and an aside - xenia - don;t count on getting much for your 10k. just cost me near that to do a masters and it doesn't necessarily translate into more teaching time. exposure to some of the leading academics in the field, at a very exciting and prestigious university, yes, but limited exposure and an awful lot of self-teaching.

hatwoman - completely agree that state schools need to be better in order to even out educational opportunities for all before 18. Asking universities to take so many mitigating circumstances into account is an admission of earlier failure by the government.

These are the Widening Participation questions that applicants to the clinical courses I'm involved with are asked:

Assessed by the University:
proportion of students (from that school)progressing to HE above or below national average

average UCAS score (of students at their school) above or below national average

postcode in 1/3 most deprived in UK

Answered by the applicant:
First in family to go onto HE

In receipt of EMA (must send in proof)

Family/cultural/social reasons for staying in East Midlands

Non-traditional qualification

We have to contact schools directly to get some of this info and when you're working through over 2000 applications it's a lot of man hours.

If a student is assessed as "WP" (2 or more markers) then they will get an offer of AAB in any order rather than As in Bio and Chem. Hardly an overwhelming difference.

I think in this case you probably do get value for money. Actually her subsequent employer is paying and she'll be on their version of the course so I'm pretty sure they'll get value for money and I think it's 9 - 5 all day so no chance for students to slack either. Not like her 3 hours lectures a week at university.

ml, I can understand why they ask those things but it does in effect reward those schools who teach badly in a sense and a parent of a briliant child could pick the worst local comperhensive save 2 years of private school fees and get the best AAAA student in that comp where everyone else gets CCC, if that, to improve the chances of their child.

That's just what happens Xenia. We have one "WP" student who did her GCSEs at a well-known selective girls' school but transferred to a local sixth form college for her A-levels. Neither of her parents went to University but they are very wealthy and have been for generations (daddy's got a seat in the House of Lords).

She is in our count of WP students for HEFCE as she meets the criteria. She's an extreme example but there are plenty of others.

Surely this is what always happens when bureacratic criteria are applied... people find a way around them.

Interviews are fairest I think.

It's mainly stats gathering Anna. We have a target of 25% of intake from WP backgrounds. The actual selection process looks at: grades (but not AS/predicted grades), personal statement, online questionnaire before deciding whether or not to invite to interview.

If invited to interview they then have: a traditional interview, a practical test, a team assessment and from next year an online biology and chemistry test.

If they get through all that and we want to offer we look back at their WP score and adjust their offer accordingly.

On the whole the very brightest get to the universities they want. It is not a prblem or issue at the moment and not big enough a difficult most parents think they should remove their children from good to bad schools. I think the poor A level teaching in some bad schools where other pupils aren't very clever would pull down most clever pupils actually over all unless they worked well on their own without good clever peers around them. I don't think it really is having much of an impact so far. But we'll see in 10 years when my youngest 2 are applying to univesrity (if they go) how it's changed.

I just got a call from the Sunday Telegraph journalist on this topic. Interesting conversation. I then passed him on to the education law association.

But I think it's a bit of a storm in a teacup and not likely to have much impact on most children.

I'm interested in the "poorest postcode" criterion. What's the resolution, down to the last letter ?
Does it take into account the fact that 20K earnings in centrla London is very different to 20K in Newcastle ?

No DC, it's based on the index of deprivation which looks at facilities, % household income below national average etc. Some london boroughs do fall into the bottom 1/3 nationally though, Tower Hamlets for example.

The parental experience of HE question will be voluntary so we are not expecting many applicants to answer and as we're not going to chase 1200 applicants for proof that their parents didn't attend HE, well it's a bit pointless really.

So it discriminates against kids from London ?

I accept what you say about it being voluntary, but do you expect it to stay that way ?

It's a load of unfair crap. Why oh why is it ok to 'discriminate' in some areas and not others. Your place at university should be detirmined soley on your own merits not on those of your parents.

I see the logic of that argument. By the time he's 18 DS will have no real assets of his own.
There are extremely few rich 18yos.
He will however have had the benefit of two graduate parents (and a graduate nanny), a quiet warm bedroom with desk, a house with more than 2500 books in it, a private education at a school that has one of the top Oxbridge entrance ratios in the country. He will be taught maths by a maths graduate who I've met and is good, a French teacher who is French, and soccer by someone who used to play professionally for West Ham in the premier league. His school does not do the fake arty "science" combined GCSE, and at the age of 5 he's being taught computers by someone who charges banks more per day for consultancy than the average IT teacher earns in two weeks.

We are spending good money and time giving our DSs an unfair advantage.

It is far easier to look at attainment than ability, so that's what most universties and employers do.

I see both sides of that. I recall a conversation with my dad where coming back from the pub he asked "mike's boy is doing O levels, are you going to do some ?" to which the response was "no, in a few weeks I'm off to university to read maths and computing".

We only had a computer at my school because we had stolen it In my year we had the same number of kids die before leaving school than go to university (bikes and motorbikes mostly), and the maths teacher had no degree in anything, much less maths. A level biology wasn't offered at all, and because we were deemed working class kids had no chemistry teacher for most of the O level.

I would have welcomed a few free UCCA points to compensate for this. However as someone who has first hand experience of how the system works from below I don't expect it to work well. It will be manipulated big time, and not for the benefit of kids who need it.

I really dont understand. Are they saying that working class people do not have qualifications? My Father had a degree when i was growing up, as did my sister. My husband has one aswell and I am a year in (yay)

we are all working class, yet ucas will discriminate against us will they? nooooo of course they wont, because they are all just pen pushers

tsk you lot are thick

It seems to me that this is all the wrong way round. If I get DC to a level where he's good enough for university I am doing society a favour. I have no realistic expectation of a good return on the costs in time and money of raising him.
Thus I should be paid for the quality of work I've done bringing up my kid. The better the university & course, the more I get paid.