Minister blasts Oxbridge over black students

Oxbridge should try to attract more black students to address its ‘staggering’ lack of diversity, the universities minister said yesterday.

Sam gyimah said admissions were focused too heavily on academic performance and needed to ‘take into account a broad range of factors’.

The Tory minister, who became the first black president of the Oxford Union debating society in 1997, claimed that diversity at the UK’s two oldest universities had barely improved from his student days.

He told the daily Telegraph the institutions should aim to help schools that were not good at preparing pupils for Oxford or Cambridge applications.

‘if you go to a school where this is not the system at all, you find it very difficult to catch up. You’re quite smart, you’ve got the potential, but there’s no one there to help you,’ he said.

‘What Oxford should be doing is helping those schools who do not have those inbuilt systems, to actually develop those advantages in those schools. if you don’t know those systems, you don’t have a hope of getting through.’

Mr gyimah said universities should make more use of ‘contextualised’ admissions – not results alone. UCL, King’s College and York have introduced such schemes to improve the uptake of black and ethnic minority students.

A spokesman for Oxford University agreed that the university had ‘more work to do’ but insisted significant progress had been made by it and Cambridge.