Why so many state school pupils drop out of Oxbridge
The pressure on the ancient universities to admit undergraduates from state schools has never been greater. But, writes Charlie Boss, many such students fare badly The Laura Spence affair in 2000 enraged Gordon Brown. The fact that Laura, of Monkseaton Community High School, was rejected by Oxford’s Magdalen College despite her straight-A predictions, seemed so deeply unfair to Mr Brown that he resolved to make Oxbridge mend its elitist ways and admit more state school pupils. A White Paper presented to Parliament in January 2003 accordingly proposed the ‘rapid expansion’ of measures intended to ‘widen access’, and the government has kept up the pressure on both Oxford and Cambridge ever since.
But there is new evidence to show that, far from helping them, the government’s drive has inadvertently made many state school pupils’ lives a misery. Teenagers who are unsuited to the Oxbridge life are being pushed into it by the government and by their target-obsessed schools, with the result that they are dropping out in unusually high numbers. Figures obtained by The Spectator from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) have revealed that as many as 69 per cent of students who left Cambridge University without an award in 2004–2005 were from a state school or college. The University of Oxford’s record is little better, with a comparable figure of 60 per cent of dropouts educated in the state sector. These statistics afford merely a glimpse into the intricacies of a highly controversial issue, and only account for students whose educational background is on record. None the less, the HESA figures deal a major blow to the powerful lobby that has been campaigning for ‘wider’ participation at Britain’s top two universities. They also vindicate Oxford and Cambridge’s continued attempts — not always successful — to resist Gordon Brown’s demands to revamp the interview-orientated admissions system.
This is not to say that privately educated students are more capable or more intelligent than those who have been educated by the state. It is, however, to suggest that they are often better prepared for life at Oxford or Cambridge. It should be obvious to even the most resentful government minister that Oxbridge students coming from the state sector frequently have to deal with a number of challenges that are comparatively alien to their independent school counterparts. These challenges are even harder in cases where the state school entrant has, in practice, had to clear a lower hurdle to gain admission.
To start with, there is the great financial burden not just of tuition fees — which can to a degree be offset by student loans — but also of living costs that can easily become overwhelming. The workload at Oxbridge means that there is little time or opportunity for those struggling for money to hold down a part-time job, and if they try, the stress can become unbearable.
Then there is the potentially elitist social side to Oxford, which can feel to the unprepared student like a collage of unwelcoming cliques and hostile clubs. Lorna Batty, a high-flying state school student who left Oxford in 2005 after just one term, admits having found it difficult to find her feet at the university. ‘I found coping with the workload very difficult in terms of balancing work and life. Partly, this may have been due to my own lack of confidence and the pressure I felt to live up to the Oxford standards, particularly as I was the first in my family to go to university. But at times I did feel socially out of my depth, too, that I didn’t fit in and couldn’t be myself.’ Lorna’s experience is far from unique, but of course the government ignores stories like hers in its eagerness to shoehorn state school pupils into Oxbridge colleges. What is even less forgivable is that it does nothing whatsoever to level the playing field once they’re there. Instead, politicians are using examples like Lorna Batty and Laura Spence as fodder for their own personal agendas without any real concern as to what’s best for the students. Back in 2000 Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, then Chancellor of Oxford, highlighted the duplicity of Brown’s foray into the admissions debate. Jenkins described Brown’s intrusion as a ‘little Blitzkrieg in being an act of sudden unprovoked aggression’ and claimed that ‘nearly every fact he used was false’. But another important point to make is that the students’ schools can be just as duplicitous and as careless of their students’ actual happiness as scheming politicians. Private schools have long used successful Oxford and Cambridge candidates as a means of publicising their product — my own school in Somerset proudly displays the names of such candidates on an ornate plaque in the front entrance hall. But now the spirit of competition fostered by endless league tables has affected state schools as well. They are beginning to bid for media attention and for the approval of parents in the manner of public schools, which often means persuading students who are neither academic enough nor keen enough to apply for a place at Oxbridge.
It was, remember, Dr Paul Kelley, Laura Spence’s headmaster at Monkseaton, who first brought her case to the attention of the media. It was also Kelley who revealed her impressive A-level grades to the press after she had declined to do so herself.
One former mathematics student, who left Oxford’s St Hugh’s College at the end of his first year, believes he was encouraged to go to Oxford ‘when deep down certain people may have felt I was going to struggle’.
‘I was at a sixth-form college which had a very good record of sending people to Oxford, and a teacher who had been to Oxford herself and clearly still had a great affinity to the place,’ he says. ‘Certainly I was advised in ways to maximise my chances of getting a place, such as putting in an open application, so looking back they probably thought I was a close case.’ In an ideal world, of course, there would be more state school pupils at both Oxford and Cambridge. But they have to be there strictly on merit rather than to meet targets. In 2004–2005, Oxford took just 53.4 per cent of its intake from state schools and colleges, with Cambridge admitting 56.8 per cent. It is clear that these figures are unacceptable in the long term, especially when set against the average for the Russell Group (Britain’s top 20 universities) of 72.5 per cent. But there is no point in politicians and schools pushing the wrong students into a laboured and stressful life without preparing them for everything that Oxbridge entails. The HESA figures show that the government’s continued drive to get state school pupils into Oxbridge is less about equal opportunities than it is about using ordinary people as pawns in a game of political point-scoring.
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