Burning injustices?

May 24, 2018 by

by Paul Goodman, Conservative Home:

Oxford University’s first-ever Annual Admissions Statistical Report breaks down applications by “domicile, nation and region of the UK, disadvantage, school type, gender, ethnicity and disability”.  That list suggests a mass of information that statisticians will not yet have had time to master.  This has not deterred David Lammy from branding the university “a bastion of white, middle class, southern privilege”.  Theresa May had more time to get to grip with figures when she drew precisely the opposite conclusion about the university sector as a whole.  “If you’re a white, working-class boy, you’re less likely than anybody else in Britain to go to university,” she said in her very first statement as Prime Minister.  That view was part of a list of “burning injustices”.

The university retreated in bewilderment before the rush of figures it had released.  “There is a lot of good news in the report, as well as evidence that there is still a great deal of work for us to do,” it declared.  In the circumstances, it would have been hard to say anything else.  There is always more to do if an elite institution is seeking to attract disadvantaged students.  It could pursue them more after A-level results are published.  It could go for more foundation courses.  It would say that is trying hard already: so it is that, along with the report, the university also announced an expansion of its summer schools, which aim to give “even more pupils from under-privileged backgrounds a greater chance of success in getting an Oxford place”.  The university’s college system seems to be a factor in making its outreach work as a whole uneven.

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Read also: Don’t blame Oxford, blame the failing state schools by Chris McGovern, TCW

 

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