What steps should Oxbridge take to broaden their intake beyond the rich, white and privately educated? David Lammy MP and classics don Mary Beard have a heated exchange
Tottenham MP David Lammy used Freedom of Information requests to show that one Oxford college admitted no black students in five years. Cambridge scholar Mary Beard says statistics mask a more complicated truth. Susanna Rustin hears the arguments.
David Lammy: People concentrate on race, but geography and class are essential to this discussion. Some colleges are doing extraordinary things ? Mansfield College, Oxford, for example. But there are many colleges like Trinity College, Cambridge where the statistics have hardly moved, and I think that is of profound concern against a backdrop of rising fees, the abolition of Aimhigher [a programme to widen access] and the EMA [education maintenance allowance]. What do they need to do? They need to reach deeper and harder, they need officers and staff across the country. They should be at the forefront of debates about what talent is.
Mary Beard: I've worked in Cambridge for 25 years, and we all want to teach the best kids from as many different backgrounds as we can. I'm not complacent ? there are worrying things happening ? but I think despite the image of Oxbridge as the sort of place where we're sitting quaffing the port as we've done for the last 900 years, it's actually a place of tremendous change. When I was an undergraduate here, there were 10% women, now there's 50%. Nobody is saying there is not more to do, but it seems to me what we need is some big joined-up thinking here about education from 5 to 25. In the end it's a bit easy to blame Oxbridge.
DL: We absolutely ought to be able to talk about two universities that receive �560m of taxpayers' money ? more than the rest of the Russell Group put together. More than half of students at King's College, Cambridge come from comprehensives and FE colleges, but at Trinity the figure is only a quarter. And I think it is for the institutions to explain why that is, and why there's a one-in-three chance of getting in if you're white, but a one-in-five chance if you're black. We ought to question why two London boroughs, Barnet and Richmond, do so well, and whole cities like Barnsley and Rochdale come out with nothing. I'm not going to suggest that there aren't failures in the school system, but I want to look at the whole ecology. It's too easy to say the kids aren't bright enough.
MB: I didn't say the kids aren't bright enough, but the cycle of underachievement doesn't start at Oxbridge. There are some wonderfully good schools in this country, and there are some schools that are failing bright kids. David's absolutely right to say there are some strange pockets of apparent non-access to Oxbridge, and you can find quite a lot of those in the north, but it's also the case that Darlington does extremely well. And the place where you have the highest ratio of acceptances to applications to Cambridge at the moment is Northern Ireland.
DL: Public and grammar-school children are schooled [in interview techniques], that's why it's indefensible that Oxford spent its outreach money on nine events at Eton last year and 12 events at Marlborough College, when there was no event in my constituency on anything like that scale.
MB: My problem with what you say is not where you want to end up ? we want to end up in the same place.
DL: But when? On your ideas we won't be there for another 1800 years!
MB: Why this is a hard nut to crack is that you have a relatively small number of places and a relatively large number of variables that you're trying to cope with. A significant number of people receiving bursaries at Oxbridge because of low parental income attended independent schools as full scholarship kids. So you get all sorts of confusions.
DL: Two questions: What accounts for the different success rates across colleges of ethnic minority pupils and pupils from poorer backgrounds? And are you saying there is no more Oxford and Cambridge can do?
MB: Sweetie, come and visit me if you think I live in an ivory tower. I'll give you one example of work I think is constructive. One of the problems we've identified in my college is that people have made wrong A-level choices, so we're now putting a lot of effort into Year 11 kids to help them make good choices.
DL: Why are the problems always outside the institutions? What are the problems inside the institutions? The rate of progress feels slow relative to the scale of the problem, and to the particular challenges we have now around fees and with the government withdrawing funding from arts, humanities and social sciences. And what you've said about A-level choices doesn't explain the variables between colleges.
MB: It's true that people apply to a college, but in Classics what happens is that all the directors of studies view the whole field of applicants. What's our aim? To get as many of these kids into Cambridge as we can. But there's no point pretending we're the only ship in the sky. Thank god in this country there are loads of good universities.
DL: Harvard and Yale are private institutions, and yet their outcomes in this area are substantially better. They have relationships with headteachers and directors of education in some of the poorest areas of the US. But if you asked the Oxbridge admissions office who the director of education in the London borough of Haringey is, they wouldn't know. As higher education minister I saw Cambridge pursuing the brightest kids in India, the brightest kids in China, but when it comes to children from Middlesbrough and Tottenham, consistently they're losing out.
MB: Look David, you're just wrong on some of this. I've been to talk at Harrow perhaps twice in my career, but when I talk to them I'm not only talking to their kids. On one occasion there were two kids from the local comprehensive in the front row, and at least one of them came to Cambridge. That's the kind of complex story behind these headlines. My mum was too poor to go to university and it was the one thing all her life that she regretted. I think you need joined-up thinking about education, you need Oxbridge to be reflective.
DL: But it isn't reflective. Both institutions have been incredibly defensive in this debate. I asked Cambridge whether I could come and speak to the admissions tutors and let me tell you what the answer was: it was no. Cambridge said this weekend that on its own benchmark figures, the proportion of state-school kids is not going to get better over the next three years.
MB: That is a reflection about the �9,000 fees. This year in my college, which may not be typical, we will be taking 64% of state-schools students.
DL: Which is very good!
MB: I am not saying Oxbridge can sit back and do nothing, but this problem is rooted in the educational experiences that people have from age five.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2011/apr/30/conversation-oxbridge-admissions
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