CUTTING THE OLD SCHOOL TIE

Roderick Smart argues that

the Oxbridge admissions' system is prejudiced against public schoolboys

WHO WANTS to go to 'Oxbridge'? The teaching is either dreadful or perfunctory. Dons are poorly paid and nourished by an unappetising diet of social resentment and arcane theory. There is an obsession with trivial neuroses about sexual harassment and suicide.

Yet everyone who is clever and has any sense wants to enjoy Oxbridge as an archi- tectural and social experience. Admission or rejection determines the shape of a life. Especially since, unlike France and Ameri- ca, we have no grandes ecoles or graduate schools where the going gets intellectually tough and an ideology might be picked up. Our band of brothers is formed earlier.

At the start of next term I shall be plac- ing my candidates under starter's orders. The admissions system is officially cool towards the public schoolboy and often unofficially hostile. I have therefore had to become cunning in my manipulation of the system.

Jake's passion for Napoleon's cam- paigns is just up Brian's street at Trinity. Emily's dated enthusiasms (she agrees with Miss Orbach that fat is a feminist issue) will surely win her a place at Jesus. Old George at Corpus is bound to suc- cumb to the charms of Harry's Virgilian cadences. Mine is an unadventurous

method. It precludes the risky choice and is shamelessly personalised. It offers the pub- lic school product a survival manual in the Oxbridge admissions jungle — that lush combination of theoretical po-faced probity about reverse discrimination with practical cunning.

I have become the tipster in the quad — a disreputable but necessary figure, as graduates in Business Studies from Leices- ter take over in school common rooms and fewer than 1 per cent of Oxbridge gradu- ates become schoolmasters. Each year the terms of engagement change. New College has been loading the dice against public school candidates. Will this continue? Is History at Caius going downhill? Is the deficit of good PPE candidates at Balliol being arrested?

My stratagems often work. But the arbi- trariness of it all is worrying. Good candi- dates can have a raw deal; bad candidates can get in. Take Maria —an exotic multi- lingual who was reading Dante at 14. She was directed, mea culpa, to a Lothario of a Modern Languages don. By the time he came to interview her he had collected as many girls as he wanted, refused to talk about French poetry and discoursed instead on the genuineness or otherwise of Maria's hair colour. The syntactically chal- lenged Hugo, however, got his place to

,

roads lead to ruin.' read Classics, failed to hack it and had to leave.

Should we weep over the death of the Old Blundellian at Oxbridge and regret that the civilised public school all-rounder is now at Newcastle rather than Brasenose? The inter-collegiate admis- sions system which held good from the late 40s to the mid-80s was that rare thing, a post-war consensus which worked. It had its Old Sarum elements of conception but it did promote reasonable discrimination. Public school candidates were mostly post- A-level applicants who took an exam in their seventh term in the sixth form. Most state school candidates sat an exam in the fourth term — their schools largely lacking the luxury of a third-year sixth form. The well-taught bonehead from, say, Radley and the untutored genius from St Kevin's were more easily identified and allowances made in either direction.

Exams survive (in the fourth term at Oxford and in the sixth term at Cam- bridge) but are less important than the interview. The result is personalisation, corruption and mistakes. Individual col- leges and dons make it up as they go along. They promote applications from comprehensives but succeed in bewildering all schools.

Oxbridge on admissions now bears all the hallmarks of an elite system embar- rassed about itself, even though it was eli- tisim which always produced the best candidates. Guilt and confusion about class lead to embarrassing and patronising ploys. Videos are dispatched to state schools in order to dispel the impression of elitism and to encourage applicants.

Admissions tutors are trying to find Judes the Obscure in the comprehensive schools. It is, therefore, now more impor- tant than ever which school you went to, though not in the traditional sense. More than half of Oxbridge undergraduates come from comprehensives. 'Independent' schools, with 7 per cent of the school pop- ulation, still seem to be doing well in accounting for the remaining undergradu- ates. Their numbers, however, now include the old direct grant schools which have always fed substantial numbers into the system and continue to do so. Mike Ather- ton's Manchester Grammar School and Eton are now in the same boat so far as the admissions regime is concerned. The reality, therefore, is of the decline of the Oxbridge public schoolboy. Public school- girls, sustained by reverse discrimination of another kind, continue to do well.

Doubts about the honesty of admissions policies are met by bland assurances that 'we are looking for potential and not for people who happen to have been well taught'. Yet secrecy, evasion and muddle, rather than meritocracy, remain the hall- marks of the colleges' procedures. The admissions tutor is often a college hack deemed unsuitable for anything else. Scep-

ticism about the value of good teaching seems an appropriate judgment from the lips of those whose own teaching record is so often dim.

These methods might be permissible if they produced incisive, cultivated merito- crats. But the Oxbridge graduate with a good degree nowadays seems an insipid mediocrity whose idea of an intellectual adventure is to take the Independent seri- ously. British graduate culture generally is a depressingly ill-read, incurious affair. At its apex stands the Oxbridge first whose prestige should surely be questioned.

The class lists show that public school boys and girls are strikingly less successful at getting good degrees at Oxbridge than their contemporaries from other schools. Perhaps they see through the pretence, are less grateful to the system, conclude that the game is not worth the candle and get on with living. Independence of mind may be more valuable to them than a craven first. After all, they have already enjoyed the luxury of being well taught and can recognise when nonsense is being spoken. Meanwhile, in the courts and the quads the admissions tutors will soon have to decide whether the next step is to discriminate against candidates from grant-maintained schools. They would be better off reflecting on how poverty of ambition cannot be cured by social engineering.

Roderick Smart teaches at a public school.