Loved this article from The Economist:
In the Wall Street Journal, Iain Martin makes the perfectly reasonable point that it would be nice to hear a government with ideas for improving state education overall, rather than crudely jamming its thumb on the scales at the moment when comprehensive pupils try to get into top universities. In his words:
Of course there is a crisis in social mobility. Politics and the professions are becoming much more difficult for the poorest to penetrate. Look at the cabinet featuring Cameron (Eton), Osborne (St. Pauls) and Clegg (Westminster). Britain?s best universities are increasingly dominated, much more than they were in my day, by the products of those and other top schools.But the answer is not to water down entry requirements to the best universities. Or discriminate in favor of groups of children that government ministers might feel guilty about having let down by failing to supply them with a good enough education in the state system.The answer is to dramatically improve state education (will this idea ever really catch on?) so that far more children from poor and modest-earning backgrounds get the grades they need to go to a top university. Previous generations used grammar schools to help boost standards and to achieve this. They unleashed a wave of social mobility. The government is in favor of free schools, but will that reform alone be enough? I can?t see that it will be
Mr Martin also makes the good point that this is yet another example of a coalition leader coming over all bossy and dirigiste, while all the while pledging loyalty to the idea of bodies like universities being freed from central control.
Much of this is right. The gulf between Britain's best and worst schools is indefensible.
But there is also something deeply bogus about this fuss, from the spectacle of Mr Clegg banging his fist on the table and demanding that top universities stop being "closed" to poorer students, to right-wing attacks on dumbing-down entry standards.
Why? Well, because top universities including Oxford and Cambridge already make much lower offers to promising students from poorer backgrounds, difficult family circumstances or state schools where Oxbridge entrance is almost unknown. And what is more, they have been doing it for years. The country's best universities could fill all their places several times over with hard-working, expensively-trained but rather dull private school pupils who would all cruise smoothly to 2:1 degrees. But the thought of that fills dons with horror, and has for decades. Back in the late 1980s, when I applied to university, it was well known that it was harder to get in from private school, and that always seemed perfectly fair. In fresher's week, apart from making bad mugs of instant coffee and asking people about their GAP years, one of the more tragic topics of conversation revolved around what A-level offers people had been given, and what grades they had actually got. It was no secret at all, and nobody made a secret of it, that pupils from tough comprehensives had been made lower offers.