The Telegraph reveals for the first time a sharp drop in the rate of admissions for independent school pupils
State school pupils are more likely to get into the University of Cambridge than their private school counterparts for the first time amid a discrimination row, The Telegraph can reveal.
The 800-year-old university has been accused of “social engineering” after Freedom of Information requests revealed a sharp drop in the rate of offers and acceptances for private school pupils.
It comes weeks before more than 20,000 applicants will find out whether they have been invited for an interview to compete for around 3,700 undergraduate places.
The university has seen a drive to boost numbers from state schools and disadvantaged backgrounds led by Prof Stephen Toope, who stood down as the university’s vice-chancellor last month. He will be replaced next year by Prof Deborah Prentice, the American provost of Princeton University who has been commended for her diversity drive at the Ivy League university.
For the first time, private school pupils are now less likely to receive an offer or win a place at the world-renowned university than state school pupils. For the start of this academic year, they had an 18.8 per cent acceptance rate, compared to 19.9 per cent for state school pupils.
Oxford University is following the same trajectory, with the gap narrowing significantly over the past decade. The latest available data, for 2021 admissions, shows that state school pupils’ acceptance success rate at 18.3 per cent was narrowly behind private schools at 20 per cent.
The Telegraph can reveal that the overall likelihood of receiving an Oxbridge offer across 50 leading private schools, including Eton College, Harrow School and Winchester College, the alma mater of Rishi Sunak, the new Prime Minister, has dropped by a third in five years.
Both Oxford and Cambridge have developed contextual admissions systems which consider an applicant’s school history as well as other factors, including the likelihood of people from that postcode attending university, which they say helps them understand their true academic potential. They deny any discrimination against private school pupils.
“It’s social engineering,” says a Surrey consultant whose son was rejected from Cambridge with four A*s. “My son and his cohort worked damned hard but his four A*s don’t seem to be worth as much as two A*s and an A from someone at a state school.”
The consultant, who does not want to be named to protect his son’s identity, said he and his wife were both the first in their families to go to university and worked hard to be able to send their son to a selective independent school.
Their son achieved A*s in maths, economics, chemistry and politics and applied to study Human, Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge. He was rejected after a Zoom interview.
However, at Brampton Manor, a selective state Sixth Form in Newham, east London, pupils were celebrating winning places on the same course at Cambridge this summer with three A*s or two A*s and one A.
The father, who spent his own early years growing up in Newham, one of London’s most deprived boroughs, said he suspected “there may be an inconvenient and uncomfortable truth” about his son’s public school background.
He added: “My question is, at what point does social mobility stop? If the state school pupils who got in with lower grades move to a nice area, are their children going to be similarly penalised for doing that?”
Oxford and Cambridge have around 6,800 undergraduate places on offer every year. While the number of places has stayed broadly the same because of the university’s guarantee of residential accommodation, the number of applications rose by 31 per cent to 47,133 in the five years to 2021.
The rise in applications has coincided with the development of selective state schools like Brampton Manor, which encourage their pupils to apply to outreach programmes hosted by the universities to inspire pupils to apply from disadvantaged areas. A rise in the number of 18-year olds in the population and an increase in applications from overseas pupils are also contributing factors.
Cambridge and Oxford both have procedures for “contextualising” the achievement of applicants by considering factors such as their performance at school relative to their peers, whether they were eligible for free school meals or have spent time in care, and the likelihood of people from their postcode attending university.
In correspondence seen by The Telegraph, a director of admissions at a Cambridge College told the father of the rejected teenager from Surrey that the university “rejects many strong applicants who would go on to do well with us” and said “there is no perfect system for making decisions”. She denied that the university was engaged in “social engineering” but said that “the student with the less good results on paper is not necessarily a less able student than the student with better results on paper.”
Oxford and Cambridge have responded to political pressure to widen their access. A Sutton Trust study in 2018 found that Oxford and Cambridge recruit more students from eight private schools than almost 3,000 other UK state schools combined. In the same year, David Lammy, the Labour MP, said: “The upper classes have a vice-like grip on Oxford admissions that they will not willingly give up.”
Oxford University responded to the Sutton Trust study saying it was “very aware” that they “must work harder”. Some university leaders believe there is more to do. Prof Stephen Toope said earlier this year that “we have to make it very, very clear we are intending to reduce over time the number of people who are coming from independent school backgrounds into places like Oxford or Cambridge.”
However, some schools and parents who have spent tens of thousands of pounds on a private school education for their child believe the pendulum may have swung too far in favour of pupils who went to a state school or are believed to come from a more “disadvantaged” postcode.
Andrew Cunningham, a former English teacher at Radley College, a boarding school in Oxfordshire, says: “We just can’t get as many people into Oxbridge as we used to and I think that’s the same across leading independent schools. It [a private education] almost seems to be a disadvantage really in many ways, especially for the top public schools.”
There are also concerns that wealthy, privately-educated pupils from overseas do not face the same scrutiny over their backgrounds when applying to the university.
Kit Morley-Jacob, 19, who was rejected from Cambridge with 4 A*s in History, Latin, Psychology and Religious Studies, believes that there aren’t enough places now that it has become an international competition.
The former pupil at Felsted, a boarding school in Essex, who has “always dreamt of being part of the academic elite”, got 4 A*s in History, Latin, Psychology and Religious Studies but was rejected after making it into the pool.
“I think the thing that probably makes it most difficult is that I remember before my interview, my teachers were sort of saying to me, ‘you just need a bit of luck’,” he says. “And it’s kind of a shame that with something so life changing, people are saying you need to just get a bit lucky, you need to catch a professor’s eye on the day, rather than actually just be good. It’s really difficult to understand everything about someone in a one-hour interview.”
Mr Morley-Jacob, who is now happily studying history at Durham, says that going to the local state school for Sixth Form could have boosted his chances, but he “felt like that was kind of playing the game”.
“I think you’re paying [for a private education] for that all round experience. I would do sports, debating and public speaking. I think that was why I wanted to stay so I didn’t have to give up those sorts of opportunities.”
Parents fearful that their child’s public school education will pose a disadvantage are increasingly seeking the assistance of admissions experts.
Will Orr-Ewing, an Old Harrovian and Oxford graduate who founded the tutoring company Keystone Tutors 15 years ago, said his Oxbridge service is getting busier every year. He has clients from Eton, St Paul’s, Harrow and Westminster.
“They’re very bright kids from top schools who need these services,” he says. Independent schools are “now at the bottom of the pile” and admissions tutors need to be persuaded that private school pupils will get a First to make them an offer, according to the tutor.
Mr Orr-Ewing says he has been told by Oxford insiders that admissions tutors will be “high-fiving each other” if they haven’t offered any places to pupils placed in the “most advantaged” category who are from private schools and have not benefited from a bursary.
He says the work Keystone Tutors does isn’t about “ teaching tips and tricks”. Instead, “it’s much more around exposing curious minds to really difficult stuff over a long period of time and making them intellectually irresistible.”
“What they really want to avoid is perhaps the sort of person that I was applying from Harrow from Oxford, which was an ‘okish, quite bright, quite up for it’ applicant but wasn’t going to go on and necessarily be an academic or get a First Class degree.”
Sarah Alakija, an Oxbridge admissions expert, says she helped a pupil from Winchester in the last admissions cycle who was rejected from Oxford, Durham, LSE and Warwick with 3 A* predictions and a “great personal statement”.
“There was no explanation that I could give his parents for that. We made sure he applied to a College with hundreds-of-years-old links with Winchester and that didn’t work either.”
She says that there’s “nothing wrong” with the Oxbridge application support that schools like Winchester, Eton and St Paul’s already give to their pupils, but “parents are running so scared that they feel that they’ll do anything to get the extra edge.” Ms Alakija focuses on helping pupils gain a deep level of understanding and a passion for the subjects they are applying for ahead of interviews.
She asked a Cambridge admissions tutor at a recent event what her favourite applicant looks like. “The response was, ‘when I interview someone I want to see the light behind their eyes when they talk about the subject’. I think that’s what you can’t prepare.”
Anonymous
The pendulum as it stands right now has certainly swung too far against private schools. Cambridge chose to include targets for state school admissions voluntarily as part of its own goals to be achieved by 2024. In recent years the university has comfortably surpassed its targets: it had 72.5 per cent state admissions this year, and 71.6 per cent last year, when the self-imposed targets stood at 66.1 per cent and 64.6 per cent respectively.
As so often happens, this success of easily overshooting our targets has not led to careful reflection on the process or to detailed study of student outcomes. Instead, it has only created a new baseline on which we are now told we need to “improve” further.
A new “Access and Participation Plan” is due to be submitted with more ambitious statistics.
The result of all this is that there is indeed a disadvantage for privately educated students. It is of course not the case that a really bright student from a public school would ever be blocked entry. But it is true that, although we are only meant to pay attention to the “flagged” characteristics in someone’s profile (socioeconomic data, low university participation postcode area, having been in care, free school meals etc.), the fact of having attended an independent school may well play out as a negative.
This tends to happen once the strongest applicants (from any school background) have been given a place: a College’s admissions tutor, keen to hit the self-imposed target, will be aware of the state-independent proportion at this stage of the admissions process, and may feel that more offers are necessary for state-school candidates in order to hit the (in practice arbitrary) target figure. So at this stage two applicants who have performed equally are likely to be disaggregated on the basis of schooling, such that the state school is considered “better” for the targets. This may disguise that the independent school candidate is a full-bursary scholarship student from a deprived background whereas the state school candidate may be from one of the most well-heeled Sixth Form schools or state grammars. So a crude metric ends up disadvantaging the potentially equally (or maybe even more) deserving.
This really comes to a head in the winter and summer pools, when students who either failed to win a place at the college to which they applied (winter) or failed to make the grades of their offer (summer) are picked up by other colleges keen to fill their places. It is almost always the case that the admissions tutor who oversees these decisions for their colleges are at this stage in a position where they feel they can only take few or, perhaps even zero, independent school students.
This basically debars deserving candidates (which is what the winter pool is meant to consider) at this crucial stage of the process, not on academic grounds but because of schooling decisions made, presumably, by their parents. If we are indeed deciding that applicants privileged with an excellent education are also saddled with the burden of that privilege, then the process starts to look grubby, unfair and, at the intellectual level, indefensible. All the while, very wealthy applicants from overseas are welcomed in, since they pay appreciably higher fees and do not impinge upon the statistics for home students.
All this said, the great majority of academics strive to take the best applicants – by which we mean those who seem to have the greatest potential to thrive on the course, which is not exactly the same as those who perform best in their A-levels and entrance exams. We seek to judge each applicant on their own academic merits, and many of us have not been debarred from taking a given candidate because of their school. But if parents have paid to put a child through, say, Eton, and admissions from that school have halved in the last seven years, the writing may be on the wall for those from independent schools who are not deemed first-rate.