Why is Oxbridge taking fewer state school students?

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/may/27/oxbridge-state-school-numbers-falling

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From the outside, there's not much at Burnt Mill academy to suggest any connection with gleaming spires, or punting on the River Cam. The comprehensive, near a Harlow roundabout, is a shabby low-rise building with a weather beaten blue frontage.

Yet a cheerful group of Cambridge undergraduates are heading here this morning. Their mission is to inspire a group of 11- to 16-year-olds with the ambition to join them in the quadrangles of the ancient university. The project is part of a £4m annual outreach programme aimed at encouraging applications from students in every social and economic class and ethnic group.

There's now broad acknowledgement that independent schools have overpopulated Oxbridge for too long. Since 2006, encouraged by the Office for Fair Access, both universities have developed activities to widen participation. They include summer schools, masterclasses, open days and college partnerships.

Every Cambridge college is twinned with specific UK areas, and the students arriving from Emmanuel are on an "access bus" tour of Essex. At Burnt Mill, students Fiona Hetherington, Chris Little and Lauren Payne run through a presentation adorned with pictures of jolly students, detailing the pleasures to be had as well as the qualities and qualifications needed to win a place. To an attentive 80-strong audience, they stress that though academic ability is vital, so are a passion for the subject and the ability to think independently.

Payne, the group's leader and Emmanuel student union's access officer, is speaking from experience. She attended one of the Essex schools on this tour. "When I told a teacher at my sixth form college that I wanted to go to Cambridge, she laughed," she says. "I was the first person from my high school to get into Oxbridge for a few years."

Payne insists that the profile of Cambridge isn't the same as 30 years ago. "I say to the kids, 'Look, I walked in your footsteps and I can tell you, you can do this.' With something so little, you can change someone's life for ever."

She's addressing a highly receptive audience at Burnt Mill. Not long ago at the school – alma mater to two Labour politicians and footballer Glen Hoddle – just 27% of pupils gained five GCSEs at grades A* to C. But now this is a place with big ambitions. The headteacher, Helena Mills, arrived four years ago and has overseen an increase in the A* to C pass rate to 76% last year. Ofsted now classes it as "outstanding" in all areas.

A huge photograph smiles down in the hall where the presentation is taking place. It is of ex-pupil Maddie Leadon, now studying medicine at Cambridge. The message to the pupils is clear – she is a role model they could emulate.

Mills has encouraged pupils as young as year 7 to attend. "I would argue that it's about belief," she says. "So we talk to them from the day they walk through the doors that they can aspire to Oxbridge or Russell Group universities."

Alex Johnson, in year 8, is impressed with the talk and interested in studying computer sciences at Cambridge. Neither of his parents went to university. Today he feels comfortable because it's on home turf. "If they come to you it feels better than if you have to go to them."

But despite all the excited talk, the actual admission figures tell a sobering story. Though only 7% of British children overall attend fee-paying schools, and 15% at sixth form, they make up 39% of Cambridge undergraduates. Figures reported this month show that an increase in admissions from state schools has gone into reverse this year with a drop of nearly two percentage points. At Oxford the figures are even starker: 43.2% are privately educated.

With the numbers so skewed, it is something of a surprise to learn that Cambridge is still on track with its access targets, which are based on a formula reflecting the proportion of pupils attaining the required A*AA grades at A-level. Put bluntly, privately educated students are over-represented as they achieve more of the grades required and Cambridge isn't about to change those.

Sheila Kiggins, Cambridge's communications officer for access, defends the need to stick to the entry criteria: "When you get here, you are applying for a very short, very intensive, very traditional, very academic course and if you come in with less than A*AA, which is the standard offer, the fear is that the students won't enjoy themselves. We could meet the target by letting loads of people in, but we want to see people come in and enjoy their studies, and leave successfully and go on to good careers."

Some allowances are made, she says, stressing that every student is looked at individually in the context of their school and home background. Tom Levinson, the university's head of widening participation, is working hard to bust myths. "There is absolutely no favouritism, no old-school network … the applicants are judged by what they can present and primarily in terms of the public examination system."

He says the process is more transparent than ever, and extenuating circumstances such as illness, bereavement and sometimes social factors are taken into account. But in practice, only a small minority are accepted without the A*AA grades because Cambridge's own research suggests a strong correlation between A-level performance and degree achievement, whatever kind of school students come from. Levinson says it would be difficult to see how they could increase the proportion of state school students further unless their number of top grades goes up.

What seems to lie behind all this is an anxiety that addressing unfairness and social imbalance will undermine academic achievement. One senses that Levinson may be addressing doubters in his own camp when he insists that far from threatening excellence, widening access should actually increase it.

"The reason that Cambridge does this work is that we want the brightest and the best students and we know that the brightest and the best students are not going to be just in a handful of schools, that's just common sense."

At the end of the week, the Emmanuel students are welcomed at Payne's old school, the Appleton in Benfleet. It's has come a long way since she left. Headteacher Karen Kerridge has established a dedicated Oxbridge career pathway for sixth formers.

It will be disappointing to teachers like Kerridge that state school admissions to Cambridge have dipped this year. The question for the longer term is: has some sort of ceiling now been reached, and if so, why?