State school oxbridge bias

[confusedmommy]

Hi, come March 1st, we are very likely to be in the fortunate position to be able pick between a top independent boys school in london ( KCS or St.Paul’s ) and a grammar school ( Tiffin or Wilson ) for my DS. The choice will be a difficult one for us. We can afford the fees but not without some sacrifices. Meanwhile I’m hearing that oxbridge is beginning to favour state school applications more so in recent years. Is this really true ? And if yes, is this only true in Oxford or is this trend seen in other top Russell group universities too. Given grammar is a realistic option for us, I am wondering even more if independent is the right choice for my DS ( who doesn’t really have a strong point of view personally )

@puffyisgood i suppose to be entirely 'fair' they'd have to apply this to every student that applies, foreign students included. Although the school with the most resources in my area has never performed better than the grammar with a lot less facilities so it's not that straight cut.

Well said!

Can I just say about grammars they are not exactly the same as independents. The funding per pupil is much lower and the class sizes are larger. The number of lessons each teacher has to teach each week is also higher. So each teacher has less time and energy to spend on each student. There is also less money for enrichment activities and catch up. A child struggling with a language will not for example be able to spend more time with a language assistant as the resource is spread thinly.

The reason Tiffin etc do well in terms of oxbridge entrance and exam results is because they are incredibly selective at entry. They also probably have less issues with behaviour management and hence teacher recruitment than most comprehensives.

However it isn't right to say they are in the same category as independents when their funding is so much lower.

The higher the number of wealthy parents whose children attend any type of school, the more likely the school is to benefit from parental donations, so, eg Tiffin School will be considerably better off than, eg, Dover Grammar School for Boys. You only have to do a quick internet search to find Dover Grammar is appealing to parents to fundraise for pianos and has 18.6% of year 7-11 children on free school meals, whereas the Tiffin School Foundation invites regular and one off contributions, suggests parents donate £520 per year as a matter of course, and has 4.1% of children on free school meals. Both schools no doubt have fewer children on free school meals than the average for their local area, but somehow I do not feel Tiffin School is particularly disadvantaged in any way!

@Walkaround grammar schools are obviously not disadvantaged in comparison to comprehensives in poor areas. But I was comparing them to independent schools. Even if every parent at Tiffin contributes £520 (they won't) the fees at one of the nearby independents are 20k a year.

@Alexandria12 - plenty of parents will be making at least the suggested contributions, as plenty are wealthy enough to send their children to private schools should they really want to, and plenty are sufficiently invested in their children’s education that they tried to get their children into Tiffin in the first place. The suggested amount would not be so high otherwise, as it would cause massive uproar to ask for something the majority of parents considered utterly ridiculous and unaffordable. You also only have to read about the facilities at the school to see that it is a school that has benefited from a lot more than just the provision of the State, so it could well be considerably better off than the sorts of private school that are not able to be so academically selective and which are already struggling financially. Presumably this is why Oxford and Cambridge do not just do a knee jerk private v state analysis, but look at a variety of factors.

Also, I was actually comparing two grammar schools - Tiffin and Dover Grammar School for Boys, not Tiffin and a comprehensive school!

As for, eg, Tiffin v Eton, obviously Tiffin cannot compete with the financial advantages of Eton.

I haven’t rtft but this stood out

Would you still have made the same decision re schools knowing this?

We had a choice between very selective private and good state comprehensive, and it’s easy to see the intake means high grades are more usual for all students in former

If that's what the winter pool has become... it's a good thing. A tiny bit of pro state school bias after decades and decades of bias in the opposite direction?

Yes. All for it. Excellent!

'I was told to go to Oxbridge. I couldnt find it on the map so went to Uxbridge instead' Brian Bilston poet.

Public and private schools are still massively over represented though considering only about 7% of the population go to them and something like 70% of some colleges consist of private school pupils.

St Paul's would be much better and give him much more all round than a state schools so yes it is worth paying for a vast number of reasons.

My children did not try for Oxbridge despite being in a faairly academic schools as they did not think they would get in because they did not think they were up to it academically and did not want to put the work in. Only about a third of these top schools try oxbridge anyway. Of my children 4 are London lawyers or almost and 3 went to Bristol and the numbers in higher paying jobs are just as high if you pick Durham/Bristol/Exeter v Oxbridge www.chambersstudent.co.uk/where-to-start/newsletter/law-firms-preferred-universities-2019 - that example is for lawyers so even if there were some anti private bias for Oxbridge which is 70% state school v 80% of sixth formers who go to state schools, it won't matter and he will do much better at St Paul's.

Thought I would share some interesting research that suggests even back in 2016/17 private school students were under-represented at RG universities once you control for A-level grades. In other words, there is a bias towards state schools and not private schools:

Private school pupils may be underrepresented at top universities

It concludes: "This under-representation is likely to increase, the more the government pressurises our top universities into taking fewer students from the independent sector. Little wonder some private school heads have recently begun to complain about unfair treatment by universities of applications from their pupils."

@tadger98
Not exactly from an unbiased source.

@tadger98 The headline says "may be underrepresented".

They also may be overrepresented.

More rigorous research needed. And some more context applies. For example, many private school students go to elite American universities. So they won't show up on RG statistics.

"many private school students go to elite American universities."

@sheepdogdelight Source and stats for that quote please.

To quote you "More rigorous research needed"

It was an example of some other factors that should be considered in the context of the (vague and woolly) headline.

This is self serving bollocks ( and I send my DC to private school)

The argument goes, that private schools often select their intake (at least to some extent) by ability, whereas the vast majority of state schools do not. Ergo we should expect private schools to dominate Universities, BUT THAT SIMPLY ISNT TRUE. There's the small matter of parents like me having to find even for modest priced prep school , never mind senior school, the equivalent of £1000 a month!!

Therefore a child whose parents cannot afford a £1000 a month to attend a prep that prepares child for senior private school,, where fees rise to £1700+ for senior school, MISSES OUT on a school with music studio, teachers with PhD's , swimming pools, Yoga teachers, small classes, etc, etc, etc....Said child at state school who is just as bright misses out. The argument fails to consider that while a school like St Pauls indeed does recruit bright children, there's plenty of bright children who entertain applying because their parents are poor and bursary places are limited.

The article admits -There is also evidence that private schools on average develop the potential of their students more successfully than the state sector does.

Universities admissions which are run by very , very intelligent people know this and therefore use contextual offers to reflect the disadvantage children in the state system have.

When will parents with kids at private school admit ( like I gladly do) we send them there for a leg up, and SHUT UP about bias, its truly pathetic.

Even with contextual offers and Oxbridge and other top Uni's making noise about widening opportunity, take a look at Oxfords recent admissions.

State school percentage are shown and reflect state school applicants are only applying for traditional subjects that might pay off going to university - Medicine, Law , Maths and Computers, apart from very traditional humanities (History) , subjects like Classics, Theology or Music are completely dominated by private schools, Music is 45% private FFS. I know friends with DC at state schools which have skeletal music departments, my DC doesn't even attend a top prep school but they have a full music studio, choirs, and can learn pretty much any instrument they wish.

@MsTSwift you can't compare those two numbers. Circa 18% of A-level students are in private education and 26% of students getting AAA attend independent schools (which is the entry requirement for numerous Oxbridge courses) based on 2019 results.

When the media use the 7% figure they are being intentionally misleading. The main way Oxbridge has been increasing state school representation is by outreach to all the talented state school students with the grades and ability to get in.

The guy tacitly admits that private school pupils may be over-represented at Oxbridge by citing the private schools' combined share of AAA+ grades, noticeably below their share of Oxbridge.

I think [I could barely bring myself to do more than skim read it] the main substance of his article is attacking a ludicrous strawman, namely that private schools' share of all pupils [c7%] should more or less exactly match their share of top university places.

Of course, nobody sensible is arguing for this. Private schools take kids who are stronger on average and dedicate vastly greater resources to educating them.

The latter point means that if two candidates [one state/one private] are exactly equal in IQ terms, 14 years in the private sector will have put the privately educated child a long way ahead, quite possibly so much further ahead for the gap to not be recoverable over the duration of a 3 year degree [which, let's face it, only consists of 3 lots of 20 weeks' worth of teaching followed by 3 years of exams].

Literally all the move towards wider Oxbridge access is doing is giving equal chances to state/privately educated kids with the same grades, not the same talent, the same grades. Such equality is something that hasn't historically existed.

@puffyisgood I agree that access to Oxbridge is being given to kids with the same grades. The only exception is foundation courses which are rightly reserved for those who have been very disadvantaged - i.e. grown up in care etc.

I also agree that private school all things being equal results in higher grades. UCL has done a study showing the impact just at sixth form is the difference between AAA and AAB.

Private schooling is in no way a disadvantage for Oxbridge.

I didn't read the PEPF blog in the way others seem to here. I thought it was just making two sensible points that were worth sharing.

The first point was that 18% of A-level students are in private schools (and not the 7% that many people here and elsewhere quote). So, a random draw by a university would mean 82% state school entrants and 18% private schools.

The second point was that you want to compare students with the same A-level results (as this defines entry requirements for universities). So a random draw by a RG university with a AAA+ entry requirement would mean 75% state and 25% private. But in 2016-17 it was 77% state and 23% private.

I understand that the issue with this approach is that it assumes that state and private schools have effectively the same value added across a student's school life. But as others point out here (and also pointed out in the PEPF blog) the evidence on private school students getting better exam results than state school students when IQ, class, parental background etc. are conditioned for is at best very small (and increasingly even that small advantage is being contested by recent research, including from Plomin and colleagues at KIng's College using polygenetic scoring)

Based on the responses here, the perfect way to get into oxbridge is a state comprehensive that has a grammar stream (many do), but otherwise a very low ability cohort. Combine that with excellent tutors and a bright child and they may get in.

I would just pick the school that you like best and can afford.

@tadger98 ..

You are looking at this from one point of view.. there is another..

All children are born equal in the eyes of 'the creator'... but those that go through fee paying schools have a much higher chance of ending up at University, especially the top 10.

Those factors include genetics, family income, ethnicity, neighbourhood and school environment.

'Controlling for' X or Y factors does not control for all factors many of which are independent.

The 7% versus 18% sweeps aside the fact that the difference in those percentages is not accounted for by greater numbers of students being educated privately for A levels, but the fact that fewer students aged 18 do A levels. The 18% statistic is no longer as widely quoted since it has been pointed out that it is the denominator that changes to reach this higher percentage, not the numerator.

The fact are that fee paying schools get a greater share of top grades than non fee paying schools... again, many factors at play but not all down to selection as there is selection involved in the progression to Sixth form college and earlier at grammar scholl selection where those are in existence.

I am not going tp draw parallels in this post (though I am doing so in my head!) ... but the insistence that fee payers have a greater right to a disproportionate share (7%) university places is one position to take, the other is that every child should have an equal right to a place and that the selection processes should take all factors into account.

Neither of these positions are entirely valid or entirely possible to implement.

There is a desire among certain quarters to redress the balance, to correct for structural disadvantages in our society and to increase representation of all parts of our society amongst those who will be designing and shaping our future society and that widening access to university is a vehicle to do so.

Whether you agree with it or not...

That's possibly true, but what a depressingly algorithmic way to view education, all for the sake of an Oxbridge place that might not happen anyway (because Oxbridge is always a gamble). And that plan would rely on not only finding and moving near to a school with that profile, but also on the teaching being good enough (and the school culture being amenable to) a child remaining inspired to work hard and find subjects they love. And on a child being happy to spend a load of their out of school time doing tutoring.

Mine are in an academic private school, and I fully acknowledge they're very lucky to have that opportunity. They're very well taught, really enjoy their subjects and like their teachers, and don't get loads of homework or endless assessment. Their days (both inside and outside lessons) pack in loads of sport and music and drama, and lots of other non-curriculum stuff besides (talks, community service, lots of clubs etc). The culture at the school is that everyone both works hard and 'plays' hard - it would be odd not to get involved in lots of extra curricular stuff. The kids just absolutely love going to school.

Will their chances of getting an Oxbridge place at the end of it be lower because of 'state school bias'? Yes, maybe. And you know what - I don't care two hoots (and I say that as an Oxbridge grad). They are getting a fabulous education, and I know that when they reach that stage, they'll be given good advice about where to apply - whether Oxbridge is a realistic (or indeed a good) option, or whether another university would be better for the subject they want to do, or whether they want to apply overseas (I don't think mine will, but lots do).

I realise this will seem like a smug post, but it just seems that in the race to make Oxbridge applications fairer we risk losing sight of what education actually should be about, in pursuit of one very specific goal, which only benefits a minority - whereas what we should be doing is to focus on making state schools better schools, not just better Oxbridge factories.