More children got three As at A-level in the country’s fee-paying schools than in the entire population of children at comprehensives."

[AubergineKenobi]

Says Toby Young in today's Telegraph:

Article

Does anyone know what percent of A-levels are taken by children in fee-paying schools?

Yellowstone- that's pretty rude. No one has felt entitled to a place. My being surprised does not mean that anyone feels disgruntled or cheated, ffs.

@Yellowstone Snap. And I agree. I don't think your school or even mine would have put us in for London Board exams from geographical considerations alone. Both had enough pride in being proper good schools that they would have switched board if the one they were using was widely known to be rubbish.

@qurrelquarrel Your posts about this poor girl have been ever so bitchy though. And coupled with the comment about her [i]not being brilliant but maybe Oxford have changed what they are looking for[/i] - not very polite at all and potentially insulting not just to her but to everyone else currently studying at Oxford. I suspect that you and your friends are not equipped to discern who is the sort of person that Oxford wants.

Really? I hadn't realised it was that bad. I do apologise if I have been insulting to those studying at Oxford....and I was responding to a point raised by another poster, although possibly I got the wrong end of the stick :) but is it so rude to say that someone is not brilliant, even if they are vouched for?

@quirrelquarrel You implied a lowering of standards. And you can't say this poor girl isn't brilliant, you just don't have enough information. Or expertise. And your definition of 'brilliant' may be very far from what Oxford want now and have always wanted. Perhaps her school environment isn't allowing this girl to show her full potential - stifling her, maybe - and yet still she is achieving fabulous grades, just being less 'flashy' than the anointed 'top boy'.

IME Oxbridge are very wary of 'top boy' syndrome. I knew several 'top boys' who didn't get in, when I did, and there were more than a few muttered 'they obviously had a quota to fill' comments when they thought I wasn't listening.

Yes, that was silly of me. I don't know anything about Oxbridge apart from the little I picked up going through the admissions process.
I do know this girl quite well- she is very vocal in and out of lessons, and she has a lot of support, works her socks off etc. The boy is shy, quiet and very modest- I don't think he's anywhere near what a token 'top boy' would be, sorry, don't know exactly what you mean. But I think I'm digging a hole here, and I do feel rather ashamed for saying all that about her. As I said, it was a surprise, that's all.

No quirrel, I wasn't rude. I know your age; I wouldn't be rude. I think the received etiquette though is to be sorry and sympathetic to those you feel should have got in and to allow those who you feel got lucky a bit of space to enjoy their spoils. I'm sure it came across worse than you meant.

Ha- it was, if it was anything verging on a pointed remark. But that's okay....you're older than me, you have the right :) I understand the etiquette, I wouldn't pour cold water on someone's success. Remember my point wasn't that she got lucky, more that it wouldn't surprise me if the standards had changed in some way. It doesn't really matter.....

@quirrelquarrel Back to digging a hole again, I see. The standards haven't changed. If anything it is tougher now. You just need to accept that you don't know much if anything about the admissions process and others, especially Yellowstone, do.

Oh, I stopped digging a while ago, but obviously you've chosen to ignore that/all of my other post...so it's not worth much afterall.

I was chatting to a friend last night who works at Oxbridge and she says the admissions process has changed and will, ihvho, change further.

The emphasis in her department at least (law) has moved to wanting to produce the next generation of great lawyers. This was anathema ten years ago.

She feels the change is being heralded by the introduction of higher fees and also the departments ultimate aim to be able to charge what it wants and rival the best law schools in the states. The students that this will attract will be different.

I know what she means. The type of student one sees at say Yale is very different to those one sees at Oxbridge (or did until recently).

She is quite depressed about the whole thing. But then she was very grumpy about her DH forgetting Valentine's Day .

I think her downer may have got the better of her then .

She's a Law tutor at one or the other presumably? Lots of generalisations in that post too. I plead utter ignorance as to the defining characteristics of Yale lawyers but the first dubious generalisation is that there is a 'type' of lawyer at Oxford and Cambridge which fits some kind of mould. There really isn't. The tutors would get bored without diversity apart from anything else. The second one being that those two universities have historically failed to produce great lawyers (wrong) and aren't doing so now (also wrong if the bright young twenty and thirtysomethings are anything to go by). My generation in eighties London was even more Oxbridge heavy than it is now and I can say with absolute certainty that there's no difference in terms of high intellect amongst the best of both generations and probably not much difference in social background, given the demise of grammars but the ascendancy of the Access Schemes. I'm also doubtful that the effect of £9K fees for 2012 entry has kicked in yet to such an extent that the whole profile of the intake has changed.

Tell your friend to talk to her colleagues and bloody well cheer up.

How is the picking of students changing for Law, then, Wordfactory? What is a "great lawyer" type? Genuinely interested (eye to the future emoticon!).

gramercy it's true that once into one of those two universities many, many students will get the whiff of money drifting up the M11 or M40 from the City whose firms court them assiduously. But it was ever thus (well, courting was a bit less vulgar in the old days I think).

It's also true that if a student wants to get in he doesn't bang on at interview about how he wants his own private jet and do mega corporate deals and concentrates instead on demonstrating that he has seriously impressive powers of reasoning in his portfolio and will be an enjoyable and/ or rewarding person to teach.

Plus ca change and all that stuff.

Well looking back on my time there, I would say that a lot of the law students weren't necessarily ever going to practise law. The thing was to study it as an intellectual pursuit.
Afterwards many went into academe, politics etc Lots went on to study further.

My friend (who has now ended up as one of the admissions tutors there) was very different to me . And I was a bit off kilter with my peers I think. She was far more like them. Though that may have been just as much about my background than my plans for the future.

She feels that Oxbridge is now filling up with ambitious high achievers, rather than the cerebral types she prefers. Very different skill sets, I guess.
The rest of her deapartment however think this is a Good Thing.

Yale lawyers in my experience tend to be very bright but it's not all about the intellectual exercise to them. They tend to be high achievers in all their chosen endeavours. They work very hard but also hone their other skills which will be useful to a practsing lawyer.

They still want cerebral types word, overwhelmingly. They don't have the equivalent of the clinical interview for medicine to test for other professional skills. Not in the best of the colleges anyhow.

And Yale is post-grad, surely?

Oxford still tries to keep hold of its brightest and best for the BCL.

I think you mean Fat Cats actually word. Fat Cats aren't the sub-set of lawyers that Oxford and Cambridge would deem to be great.

@wordfactory @Yellowstone

I was at Cambridge not Oxford, in the 80s. All the law students I knew went on to work for magic circle firms. All of them. Obviously that's a tiny proportion of the lawyers who were there at the time, but still. Several of the people I knew who were studying other subjects then went on to do the 2 year law conversion course after finishing their part 2s and they also went on to work for magic circle firms. I do know one academic lawyer, she didn't study at Oxford or Cambridge.

Fat Cats, now there's a loaded term!

But I suspect my friend would agree with you yellow that those are not necessarily the type she would like to see in her dapartment. Or not in its entirety anyhoo.

But if the powers that be have their way and they are allowed to charge fees in line with, say Yale, who will take on that sort of debt without having their eye on a very well paid job at the end of it? And for those eye watering amounts the department will need a consistent track record of being the place where the highest paid lawyers study. Which I suppose is what they're trying to do now, build in that track record by admitting enough of those Fat Cats .

Well well, this doesn't surprise me one bit. DD is at a 'good' comp, no grammar schools nearby so a wide ranging intake including some from the local indie (at 6th form). I would say one or two might get 3 A's at A level but only with the aid of private tutoring and usually from highly academic families.

That's a terrible shame adam which pretty much refutes that oft peddled MN classic 'a bright child will do well anywhere.'

Not that I ever believed it in the first place. Lots of poor performing schools are packed with highly intelligent and able pupils who underperform shockingly.

But Fat Cats is a splendid term word :)

I think that may be upside down thinking. Oxford and Cambridge have nothing to prove on that score, they have the evidence of generations for those of that bent.

I'd expect the integrity of the Law dons coupled with a need for their race to survive to save both universities from a downward descent into a pre-training training ground for Cats.

Agree completely about schools. We happen to live near a top performer. Had my DC not got in and gone instead to any other school in the area their academic profile would look utterly different. It's absolutely been down to the school. So much these days hinges on luck.

Yeah but.... a bright child will do well anywhere .