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 )

Indeed.

Oxbridge is certainly not biased against applicants whose parents have bought them educational advantage.

The proportion of privately educated students at Oxbridge is around twice the proportion of such pupils nationally.

I think really bright children with supportive parents will do just as well at decent state schools, but I do believe that private schools confer advantages for kids who are academically average, lacking in self confidence and/or unable to self motivate. I think it's probably a good investment for those kids.

Personally, I don't blame any parents for sending their kids to private schools if they believe it's worth it. I would do the same if I didn't think it would be a waste of money for a kid like dd. I'm not judging the decision to go private per se.

What I do judge is the sense of entitlement that some private school parents seem to have with regard to university places, and the idea that any attempts to level the playing field are somehow unfairly disadvantaging their children. They are not. I also judge those who make assumptions that richer people are generally cleverer and that private school kids are therefore more deserving. And I feel very strongly that, as a society, we need to do more to balance out the disadvantages for those kids who don't have supportive, educated and ambitious parents who know how to get the best for them in either sector.

Tbf some private schools are full of academically excelling, motivated and confident dc due to selection.

ime choosing the best fit for the child is the way to go but that is a privilege state or private

Many state schools are very hard to access due to house price and tiny catchment and parents buy advantage that way

Oh yes, I agree with all of that.

Personally, I never really understand the attraction of the highly selective private schools full of kids who would probably excel wherever they went. I can only assume that people are paying for the cohort itself, which I guess isn't surprising given how many people are so keen on state grammar schools as well, but I don't really understand the attraction of those either.

Fair enough if people want to pay for it. I just don't really get why.

@MrsBennetsPoorNerves i agree with your last paragraph 100%. I totally support higher taxation to improve state education, for example. But I also think private school can be worth the money for clever, well supported kids, if you're looking at the broader education and school experience rather than just the exam results or university destination.

Oh, I completely agree that it isn't just about universities and exam results. Education is so much more than that. Ultimately, I guess it depends on the schools in question, on what you think is important and on what you as a family feel you can offer to supplement what they get in school. I don't personally feel that my dd's education would have been enriched in any way by going to any of our local private schools - quite the contrary, actually - but I have no issue with parents who reach different conclusions. I'm sure that we're all doing whatever we think is best for our kids.

My concern is really for the kids who don't have parents who are able to support their education. Those are the children that we're currently failing as a society, and generations of politicians have failed to do anything about it.

I have no problem with people paying for private education (i was privately educated myself).

But I absolutely also have no problem with universities trying to unpick from good results who has more ability/flair to make sure those who haven't had advantages of small undisrupted classes with less pressured teachers, and make offers to them.

I also think the 'came from private' measure should be for anyone who had 2 years in private at any point from y10-y13. (Or even more radically private at primary followed by selective grammar for secondary).

@diar - what you mean is, there is a huge difference in attitudes in the echo chamber you are living in. As for the morality/immorality question debated in this echo chamber, it has more to do with the question of whether the chances of state education being starved of funding are massively increased if there’s an easy get-out clause for the wealthy. Also, the debate often includes discussion of the risk of fuelling the sorts of odious beliefs about genetic superiority that tend to arise in societies that are relaxed about extreme inequalities in quality of life and of opportunity, as it is so easy to mistake superior life chances for superior innate qualities of character and intelligence.

As the state has opted out of provision of housing, there is just a free market of misery and gross inequality on that front, so of course it is perceived differently when discussed, even if acknowledged to be a similarly humongous problem.

@MrsBennetsPoorNerves maybe you would understand the attraction of grammars if you lived in an area like us.It is affluent and one would assume (as we had when we moved there) that the state provision would be good. The reality was that the situation was polarised. The majority of DC went to private schools and the state schools available to us took in a wide area and had very difficult cohorts. Much as I believe that this is a very sad situation and at odds with my own beliefs, there is no way that I would have thrown my children under the bus of my own ideology. As you know from other threads, their intelligence was never in question and they also have good social skills. They were untutored for entrance to their grammar schools and have both performed at the top of their cohorts there. I honestly don't know if they would achieved what they have in a much more challenging environment (we are talking knives in class here) or be on the university paths that they are. However, I think it would be arrogant for me to just assume that they would have, as many kids who are equally intelligent sadly fall by the wayside in such difficult learning environments. Maybe this is just a London thing but the picture is complex.

@TeenDivided on the surface, I agree with you. But if there's going to be such adjustments, what should university admissions people do with applications from young people who were being massively let down/bullied/additional needs not being met in the state system and whose move into private was not from family wealth and privilege but via massive sacrifice and financial hardship because it wss the only way the young person would get any kind of education at all. Certainly a lot of the private school pupils could be seen as having "bought a privilege" but others are more akin to refugees from a broken system, and maybe shouldn't be penalised for having survived in whatever way was open to them?

'What I do judge is the sense of entitlement that some private school parents seem to have with regard to university places, and the idea that any attempts to level the playing field are somehow unfairly disadvantaging their children. They are not. I also judge those who make assumptions that richer people are generally cleverer and that private school kids are therefore more deserving. And I feel very strongly that, as a society, we need to do more to balance out the disadvantages for those kids who don't have supportive, educated and ambitious parents who know how to get the best for them in either sector.'

Sorry can't do bold! This is it really. And this is what these threads so often throw up. It's the weird eugenic arguments a about bright children and where they come from which bothers me most; try flipping them to suggest less academic children come from less academic families and it suddenly y becomes quite sinister.
In addition it's always bandied about that people who go state are making choices to live in leafy areas and have extra tuition. In the vast number of cases this isn't true. And neglects to mention the reverse: that privately educated kids tend to live in better houses and may also have all those extra enrichment benefits on top. So privilege piled on privilege.
I honestly don't have a problem with people making a choice. But please own that choice!

I also think the 'came from private' measure should be for anyone who had 2 years in private at any point from y10-y13. (Or even more radically private at primary followed by selective grammar for secondary).

In my DC's grammars there are some naturally bright DC who have come from prep schools. However there are others who arrive heavily tutored and really not up to the pace there. They tend to be the DC who are asked to leave after GCSEs and end up back in the private sector for A levels. To be honest, in my DC's grammars there was no big advantage of having come from prep, maybe in sports but not in academic measures. There may have been a bit of a disconnect in what had been covered by end of year 6 but certainly no advantage that wasn't ironed out by the end of Year 7.

Top grammars are treated very similarly to top private selectives by Universities in terms of ranking their achievements within their high performing cohort. There is the odd quirk though such as I believe that it helps being from any state school, selective or otherwise, for the Cambridge summer pool.

@FaazoHuyzeoSix There is a difference between the 'were they at state or private' measure and 'contextualised grades'. I was more talking about the former than the latter. I agree 'refugees from the state system' are not privileged educationally in the way someone who has been private all the way through will have been.

Agree opo in the next city along the state schools weren’t great so the middle class who could went private so the state schools deteriorated further in a vicious circle.

We chose this city as the educated middle class largely use the state schools. They are genuinely mixed. So on a larger scale I think there is harm in having an alternative get out”for the wealthy. That said I would never judge individuals doing what is right for their own child.

@TeenDivided contextualisation is applied to state selectives. For the top state selectives, the bar will be raised higher than for many less selective schools in the private sector.

Unless they are baldly playing the system in which case they are sneaky gits!

My dds school and the equivalent boys school do not get contextual offers the other state school does I think.

The state schools where we live are all good or outstanding, good Progress 8 etc. All comprehensive. So anyone in this area (there are so very expensive parts, some with high levels of deprivation) can send their child to a good state school - which is 'best' depends on the needs/interests/personality of their child. They all offer a range of extra-curricular activities, although probably not the range and depth of private schools.

DD's school has given her fantastic support from day 1 (the support specified in her EHCP was already being provided, because it is what she needed). They also have a set of support activities for young people aiming at Oxbridge and RG universities, and regularly send pupils to a range of prestigious universities.

But it is far more affordable and accessible for 'ordinary' families to support their children with extra-curricular and enrichment activities than paying for private school. Even so, with DD's particular area of interest her development has been limited by my financial circumstances. On the other hand, she has had far more activities/ experiences than many, many young people in this borough.

I do find it strange that parents who send their child private will quite happily say it is because the education is 'better' (it's not to make sure the other pupils are the 'right sort'!) until it gets to something like university admissions, when they are being 'excluded' because the universities recognise that an element of their academic achievement is due to abetter education not their own abilities or hard work.

I think if you have a state school you are happy with then that’s a benefit already and I wouldn’t worry too much about private schools, it’s good the access to top universities is widening. Dc state have pathways to Oxbridge etc

We actually had the opposite to pp in that our dc derived confidence from being in a state and a mixed cohort, whereas a competitive private would not have been a good fit. I would say the other dc has benefitted from a selective school.

Of course you can not really know for sure how things will go until you do it but if you have a happy, thriving dc in either sector that’s great.

Sigma, I am a private school parent and my children (and indeed I in my day) did not try for Oxbridge which is the case for most children at private schools by the way. I have never said Oxbridge is as yet causing massive problems with contextualisation. However it does need to be watched carefully.

On this other person's comment above "The proportion of privately educated students at Oxbridge is around twice the proportion of such pupils nationally." I thought it was more like 20% at private schools at sixth form level and they get 70% of the Oxbridge places so it is more like a 10% "gap" not 50% "gap" but I might be wrong and the 10% could well be caused by factors like parents more likely to choose fee paying for a child where local schools may be do not cater for the very high grade achieving child (in the eyes of the parent anyway) or having a bright child on a bursary etc etc. In other words it is a reasonably fair balance now.

Oxbridge are just as, if not more elitist, than our top private schools. Plus they are selling our UK places to overseas students in bulk to raise fees for themselves (eg Chinese med student pays 63000 GBP a year vs 9250 UK student) This infighting between middle class parents of state/grammar/private schools parents needs to stop and people need to wake up to the fact that this is a classic distraction tactic by Oxbridge themselves (to some extent, although of course journalists will be blamed for it all). We should be fighting to keep the places for all UK educated kids and hold them to quotas there. White poor working class boys, in particular, are massively underrepresented. What are we as a society doing for them?

Post Covid shortage of uni places in UK - stop selling them abroad! We need to educate our own young first who we have already let down massively. I don’t care if the state schools have been underfunded and kids not up to scratch - the unis should plug the gaps, rather than taking overseas cash.

commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7976/

In 2020/21, there were 605,100 overseas students across all types of UK higher education institutions. This was an increase of 109,000 since 2018/19 and meant the Government’s target of 600,000 international students by 2030 was met 10 years early.

Numbers excluding alternative providers
584,100 overseas students were studying at UK universities, 148,100 from the EU and 436,000 from elsewhere. This was another new record total and 22% of the total student population.
In 2015/16, the number of new overseas entrants to UK universities was just over 230,000, increases in the last five years saw overseas entrants numbers reach a new high of 318,400 in 2020/21.

The increases are mind boggling.

Should overseas universities, e.g. the US Ivy League universities also restrict themselves to American students? Especially any bursary/scholarship funds?

Of course, if the education sector was properly funded (schools and universities) there would be less incentive for UK universities to take overseas students...

@Sigma33 - why don’t you do a little googling. Ivy League is typically around 10 per cent max, self imposed quotas. Oxbridge on the other hand - exponential unaccountable growth of international students. It is ridiculous the press are not all over it.

And no, I don’t care if the academics at Cambridge want to compete against the academics at Harvard. I care about our crumbling country first and foremost not about the edges of academia. There is something fundamentally broken if this is leading to the middle class breakdown we are seeing.

So my contention is that Oxbridge are indeed selling the places of poor bright UK students abroad.

@Cosyblankethottea I didn't Google the stats because I was querying the principle.

And strangely enough, the original proposition wasn't that 'poor bright UK students' are being blocked from Oxbridge, but that they were being unfairly favoured over privileged bright UK students 😂

And as a pointed out clearly, the original proposition is a distraction by Oxbridge themselves from the underlying issue which is places are shrinking for all UK students. And the distraction bait being used is privileged private school students have been taking those places. Or if you reverse it, that UK state school pupils are now taking your privileged DCs places.
Well guess what - they aren’t - the unis are selling the places to rich foreigners!

And no, I am not going to compete with the US, being the richest economy in the world, on any level. We proudly fund our NHS for all and that comes at a funding cost educationally. I am not going to compare how many weapons the US has either etc.
Yes, they fund their unis, yes those unis are super rich and yes they are “stealing” our top academics. But boo hoo, too bad.

We need to tap our private sector corporates etc to fund the endowments for our top unis etc. Not sell the student places abroad.