Oxford alone can’t rescue poor white kids

Until more deprived pupils get better grades at school, universities will struggle to broaden their intake

Oxford University’s plan to launch a summer school for poor white children is to be applauded. Our best university is the latest to recognise that poor white children do worse than any other group in terms of education. They need help, and Oxford wants to provide it.

But for all its good intentions, Oxford can only do so much, because white working-class children are not going to get a look in at the best universities while they flounder at schools.

When I started there, my dad described Oxford as a university version of John Lewis. In a sense he was right: Oxford remains a very southern, very middle-class institution. 2015’s intake saw a decline in admissions from state schools and more than 2,800 applications from London alone. There were just 211 from the North East of England.

As a northerner from a state school, I was a relatively rare specimen at Oxford, but the narrowness of the intake didn’t get in the way too much: my university experience was enriching and positive.

Explaining that Oxford can be a happy home for people who don’t come from comfortable backgrounds is where university outreach work can do a great deal of good. As a student I took part in one such project, helping deliver a rigorous academic programme to bright children at state schools in one of the poorest parts of London. The greatest challenge was simply persuading them that Oxford wasn’t just for alien poshos; that people like them would be welcome.

Demystifying university is a vital part of broadening access to our best colleges. As the House of Commons Education Select Committee has noted, students from deprived backgrounds can have the aspiration to go to places such as Oxford, but they sometimes lack the social capital – advice and guidance and contacts – to make the most of their ambitions.

The Oxford project may help a bit here. Successful applicants will have the opportunity to be taught by Oxford academics and sample new subjects. That can only be a good thing. But it probably won’t make a discernible impact on the desperately low admissions of the white poor. It should be the case that Oxford is as attainable for the children of a Redcar comp as it is for boarders at Rugby, but until their grades match up, it won’t be.

Less than a quarter of deprived white boys achieved five A*-C grades at GCSE in 2015 – the lowest proportion of any ethnic group. White girls fared a little better, but not by much, with 32 per cent achieving at least five good grades. Unsurprisingly few continue into further education: just 29 per cent of poor white boys even do A-levels.

Poor white children have languished at the bottom of results tables for years, though politicians have only recently started paying attention. By contrast, the past decade has seen rapid improvements in the achievement of ethnic minorities: nearly 50 percent of the poorest British Asian children get more than five good GCSEs.

Oxford University and its Russell Group peers maintain their prestige with puritanically tight admission standards. Offers for places at Oxford are conditional on achieving A-level grades of around A*A*A.

Those are tough grades. The fundamental reason so few white working class children go to Oxford is that so few of them get those grades. Until they do, top universities’ hopes of a more diverse intake will be just a pipe dream.

Lowering entrance requirements might look like a good quick fix but it is not the answer. Academics already bemoan how increasingly ill-prepared freshers are for university academic life. The focus needs to be further upstream: how can we get more of the white poor to stay at school and get good grades?

There is no simple or obvious solution. Evidence on the impact of past programmes aimed at improving ethnic minorities’ achievement is thin on the ground. The Government isn’t flush with cash to throw at the problem. Instead we should look to lessons that can be learnt from areas such as London, where poor white students perform much better than their peers in other regions.

But we should also be mindful of the fact that 80 per cent of children’s time is spent outside the classroom – if we want poor white kids to do better and go to universities such as Oxford, we should face up to the fact that much of the solution will remain outside the school gates, with parents.