Dreaming spires for all? Only if we face up to some hard truths

There’s a fundamental problem at the heart of our education system: private schools educate around 7% of students yet account for 44.6% of students at Oxford. A familiar statistic, but one that highlights the failure of too many of our state schools. Defenders of educational elitism rightly point out that top universities should take the best pupils wherever they find them. But making this point is too often a way of avoiding the real issue: that our state school system is failing to produce enough bright, confident and hard-working children.

I refuse to believe or accept that talent is concentrated in the offspring of the rich, and so our attention has to be turned to a state school system that disparages academic rigour, promotes educational fads, and lacks the confidence to inspire children to great things. It goes without saying that there are some places in the education system where you will still find a rigorous, challenging and inspiring education, but they are sadly few and far between.

Another, connected, problem with the road to university is that raw grades aren’t the best indicator of ability and good schools are simply getting too good at teaching to the exam. Research by Tony Hoare at Bristol University found that by the end of university, students who had attended poor schools far outperformed those with the same grades who had been better educated. This seems to show that ‘good’ schools aren’t necessarily producing more intelligent students, simply ones that are better at passing the exams. This doesn’t automatically mean that we start lowering the grades for students from weak schools, but it does involve recognising that the current system isn’t good enough at identifying the best talent. A possible remedy may be increasing the use of interviews.

For all this talk of intelligence and grades, one simple fact remains: that even where there are identical candidates on paper the one from a decent independent school (or from a handful of state-funded ‘Oxbridge factories’) will be more likely to get a place at a top university. This isn’t because of outright bias by the Universities, but because of informal information networks that the top secondary schools are privy to. Information is key in the application process to good Universities (especially for Oxbridge): whether it be which subjects to study at A-Level, or what University or Oxbridge College a student is more likely to get in to. Whether it comes from a 100 year history of Oxbridge success or an old friend of the Headmaster, the top schools seem to have more access to the information that makes all the difference.

This article shouldn’t be seen as an invitation to scold our top universities for bias, or to demand that they become centres for social mobility, but to face up to the harsh reality that equally talented students don’t compete on an equal playing field, and that our state school system doesn’t do enough to promote academic excellence and get the very best students to the very best universities.

Throughout October and November, The Independent Online is partnering with the Institute of Ideas’ Battle of Ideas festival to present a series of guest blogs from festival speakers on the key questions of our time.

Jacob Reynolds is a politics undergraduate at the University of Sheffield and an alumnus of the Debating Matters Competition. He spoke at the Battle of Ideas session Dreaming spires for all? Oxbridge and social mobility, organised in partnership with the RCA Students’ Union and in association with Times Higher Education and the IOI Education Forum.

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• MelT0711

  I agree that the stats show a depressing lack of social mobility, but your explanations/solutions are confused.
  Firstly, teaching to exams is not exclusive to state schools, it happens in private schools too. The reasons why parents buy a private education is precisely to get the best grades and entry to a top university, they are not necessarily better places of learning, quite the opposite, they are hot-houses of exam prep. What parent will pay a min. £10k per year without the guarantee that little Timmy will get top grades? It’s a gamble to buy Timmy access to the “right circles” – we are still a class based society.
  Secondly, many very bright young people with great grades are put off the Oxbridge colleges because of perceived snobbery/not likely to fit in, and given the low numbers from state schools their fears are very real and so choose another unversity which they believe to be more like them. Oxbridge colleges have failed to address this problem and politicians – who are frequently products of the same system – have very little appetite to change it. That’s great news for the many excellent unversities around the UK, which are targetted by top companies to recruit their best graduates.
  In the end, it’s the ordinary taxpayer that loses out, perhaps if Mr & Mrs average realised how much we subsidised the private education of wealthy children politicans would be forced to do something about it. Only when private schools are abolished will we see real social mobility and a significant improvement in state education. 

• Paul Rowland

  Oxford’s stock defence against accusations of bias in favour of the old school network is that they can only consider somebody if they actually apply, and that the biggest obstacle to state-educated students getting into Oxford is …. they don’t bother applying in the first place. Do the elite universities have a point?

  The fact that only 6-7% of all kids are privately educated but 45% of Oxford students are privately educated does seem to provide evidence of some bias, but if you look at the Oxford application stats over the past 2-3 years, the split of applications from the state/private sectors is about 45%/55% – and this broadly matches the split of successful candidates. For whatever reason – lack of information, lack of encouragement, inverted snobbery, fear of rejection, whatever – as things stand, not enough state kids are throwing their hats into the Oxbridge ring.

  I wonder, how many state-educated straight-A students didn’t even bother applying for Oxbridge last year? Hundreds? Thousands? Tens of thousands?

• Seven01732

  Oxbridge are not discriminating against kids from ordinary backgrounds. That’s rubbish.

  They are however discriminating between decent students and excellence.  Comprehensives are set up to deliver average and that equals mediocre and is way short of excellence.

  One of my kids goes to a grammar in Kent where they managed to get 9 kids into Oxford / Cambridge last year. That is one school that promotes academic excellence.  It is also a free State school and so there are systems which exist that can deliver academic excellence to any child.   

  It is the psychology of social envy that holds back greater selective education but it is the only way to change the entry stats.

• DeadReckoning

  Funding per State pupil is around £5000. However £2000 is wasted by the Education authority and never gets to the school itself. Many provincal independent school fees (day) are not much more than £5000. If people could keep their own taxes instead of the State wasting it, or get vouchers to allow funding to follow the pupil – there would be far more people able to escape (and that is the operative word) the “let’s pretend everyone’s a winner” State system.

• DeadReckoning

  If only. But it’s not PC to exclude anyone. Soclalism means everyone has to suffer.

  Meanwhile we are out competed by countries that don’t play by these “rules”.

• http://www.facebook.com/people/Brian-Jamieson/629899261 Brian Jamieson

  The past two medal winners in architecture have been from Westminster University not Cambridge as one example.