How to play the university admissions game
It had been seven years since a pupil at Joshi Herrmann’s local comprehensive last won a place at Oxford or Cambridge.
But could his offer to give its brightest pupils confidence and support bring better results?
One day after school in January this year, Isabelle walked to the high street in East Grinstead, West Sussex, where her mother works in a shop selling gifts and clothes. She was with her boyfriend, Alex, who would be meeting her mum for the first time. “It took her by surprise a bit,” Isabelle says, remembering the awkwardness of the moment.
When that was over, Isabelle sprang another surprise: a few hours earlier she had received an offer to read Earth sciences at Oxford University. “Mum gave me a big hug,” says Isabelle, who is now 18. “She was over the moon for me.”
That evening, Isabelle sat down to think about it. Over the past month she had convinced herself that she wouldn’t get into Oxford, and that she didn’t belong there anyway. She remembered the terrible night after her first interview, sitting in a college room in tears, feeling like an impostor. But now, with an offer letter on the table, she started to have a change of heart. She was going to be the first person in her family to go to university, and this was an offer from one of the best in the world. “I thought,
I’ve got to do it,” she says.
Isabelle and I first met in March last year at Sackville School, a comprehensive in West Sussex. The school is close to where I grew up, and for the past year and a half I have been mentoring students there, trying to help them get into Oxford, Cambridge and other top universities. It started as a casual offer of help and went on to become an all-consuming project – one that has given me more satisfaction than any story I’ve written as a journalist.
High-achieving students at state schools like Sackville often lose out in the battle for places at the most selective universities. The application process is supposed to uncover talent and potential, but often seems designed to reward traits such as confidence and polish, handing an advantage to applicants whose parents went to university, and whose school knows the subtleties of a good application, often due to long experience. In the case of many private schools, knowing how to convert great A-levels into places at elite universities is often the reason they can charge such high fees.
I first met Isabelle and her schoolmates soon after my father died in 2018. Helping out at Sackville was a distraction from my grief, and felt like a civic-minded thing to do. Added to that, three generations of my relatives had gone there, since my Jewish Czech grandparents settled nearby as 1940s refugees. These included aunts, cousins and, currently, my cousin’s 12-year-old daughter.
Sackville is probably what many people picture when they think of a comprehensive: 1960s buildings, well over a thousand students, and some very average A-level results, literally: the school’s average A-level grade is a C, which is the national average. It performs above average at GCSE and is rated “Good” by Ofsted; but its sixth form isn’t selective, and some four in five students have parents who didn’t go to university.
In recent years, Sackville’s deputy head, Adrian De Souza, had become frustrated that too few of his best sixthformers were getting places at top universities. No Sackville student had gone to Oxford or Cambridge since 2013, despite plenty of them having good enough grades. The proportion of leavers going to sought-after Russell Group universities was also disappointing. With spending per pupil in England having fallen 8% in real terms since 2009-10, De Souza felt it was becoming harder to compete with the private sector. But he believed that what was possible for students at local private schools should be possible for his students, too. (Disclaimer: I went to one of those private schools, and to Cambridge University.)
“The application process is supposed
to uncover talent, but often seems designed to reward traits such as polish”
At one point in my first meeting at the school, Isabelle was waved in – a confident girl in black jeans, with wavy blonde hair that she dyes ginger. After being introduced, she asked me what she could do to prepare for an application to Oxford and other prestigious universities like Imperial, Manchester and UCL. I didn’t have a good answer ready, but later that night I emailed friends who had also studied at Cambridge. I asked them: what would you tell her? “Interview training is imperative,” replied a friend who now works in the City of London. Others offered tips about preparation, or emphasised the importance of being confident in your application.
A few weeks later, Sackville’s head of sixth form, Helen Valentine, assembled ten of her highest-achieving year 12s, including Isabelle. They sat in front of me, chatting among themselves. For those who wanted to apply for Oxford or Cambridge, or to study medicine, the deadline was about six months away. These students became known as the “Oxbridge group”, but everything we were doing was supposed to work for Bristol, Durham and all the other universities they were applying to at the same time. I told them we would meet every week or two, and that I’d try to give them something akin to the support students from private schools get. They seemed receptive, but didn’t ask any questions. I tried to project confidence about the whole thing, because I knew
how important confidence was going to be. But naturally, I also had some doubts.
If you want a place at a top UK university, you need to beat a lot of very well-prepared, expensively educated rivals to get it. A recent report showed that almost half the schools that teach the most privileged 20% of students in the country – mostly private schools and grammars – have at least one dedicated “university adviser”. St Paul’s in London has 12 “UK university advisers” and nine staff for “US university applications”. And if wealthy parents aren’t content with what their school gives them, they often top it up with private tutors – many of them recent graduates from the very courses being applied for. A new book, Social Mobility and Its
Enemies, calls this “education’s dark side” and warns of an ever-escalating “arms race”. Lee Elliot Major, the book’s coauthor and a professor of social mobility at Exeter University, tells me that in an increasingly complex admissions process, there are big advantages for those who know the “rules of the game” – including the subtle art of tailoring your personal statement: the one-page sales pitch that all applicants must submit via the Ucas system. With just £4,000 a year to educate each sixth former, most state schools simply don’t have the resources to compete.
The result is that entry to leading universities is dominated by private schools and a narrow group of state schools that are either highly selective, have a long tradition of getting students into elite universities, or both. Admissions data shows that Oxford and Cambridge make about half of their undergraduate offers to state school students, with the remainder split roughly evenly between private school and overseas applicants. But the vast majority of the state school offers went to just 300 schools. These are mostly grammar schools, highly selective sixth-form colleges or academies in wealthy areas. Students from the remaining 90% get significantly fewer Oxbridge offers. On average, regular comprehensives like Sackville get an offer from Cambridge once every four years, and from Oxford every five years. The challenge was to help the school jump from the forgotten 90% into the tiny elite.
Isabelle was joined in our little group by others – including Lucy, who was applying to read English at Cambridge; Eren, a tall, unflappable young man hoping to study science at Cambridge; and Ayo, Sackville’s head boy, whose parents had come to England from Nigeria when he was small, and who wanted to go to Stanford in California to read economics. After a month or two, I started to have a good feeling about them. They had the kind of grades top universities expect, and they seemed to enjoy the challenge we had been set. I told them to treat getting into university like a mini extra A-level: something that requires a bit of work, reading interesting articles about their chosen subjects, and learning how to talk about what they had read.
As summer arrived, my volunteering gig was occupying more of my thoughts. I used my university friends to answer questions about courses, colleges and future careers. Two of them helped with practice interviews, meeting the students and urging them to believe in themselves. In June, my old tutor at Cambridge agreed to show the students around the university, giving them tips as they went. I wasn’t sure how they would respond to the visit, but Valentine says it was a turning point: “There were no more tears and drama after that. We felt something special could happen.”
By mid-January this year, we knew our efforts at Sackville had paid off. Every student in our group had offers from universities such as Durham, Imperial, LSE, Edinburgh, Manchester and UCL. And then, while I was driving along the motorway on a grey morning, I saw an email from Valentine: Isabelle had an offer of A*AA to read Earth sciences at Oxford. And Grace, another of our applicants, had been accepted by Oxford to study geography. I pulled into the next service station, sat down in a Starbucks, and punched the air several times.
I later heard that both Lucy and Eren had received offers from Cambridge, and that Ayo had been offered a place at Stanford. The final list felt almost unreal: twice as many Sackville students as the year before had Russell Group offers.
At around the same time that Sackville students were submitting their applications, Oxford’s Worcester College was coming at the same issue from a different angle. Dr Marchella Ward, whose job it is to attract a wider cohort of students to the college, was challenging her colleagues to make this year’s intake “genuinely representative”. She resolved that the students who got Worcester offers should look like the students nationwide who achieve AAA and above at A-level, in terms of their schools and economic backgrounds. That meant persuading admissions tutors to focus on how they assessed potential and why the college was missing out on so many outstanding students. When it came to targets, she asked them to pay particular attention to a new dashboard of “contextual” data, provided by the university about all Oxford applicants, which ranked every student by factors like what percentage of their school is on free school meals. It was an initiative which she says led to 83% of the college’s offers going to state school students – and several Oxford colleges have since asked her how she did it.
“The challenge was to help my local comprehensive school jump from the
forgotten 90% into the tiny elite”
Between Sackville and Worcester, you have two different approaches to solving the problem of access to our most selective universities. You either teach a lot more students the rules of the game – or you change those rules. Some people, like Elliot Major, support sending trained advisers into every school, paid for by the Government. Others suggest scrapping personal statements and the system of applying for university before you get your results.
Of course, the pandemic has complicated matters. All of the Sackville group ended up with the grades they needed, despite the flawed A-level algorithm. But none of us knew how strange their university experience would turn out be. Ayo has begun his Stanford degree remotely, and Eren says he has “accepted it’s going be different”. Now, as a new cohort of state school students around the country make their applications for next year, many have missed a huge chunk of lessons. There are well-founded fears that private school pupils and those with private tutors will have an even greater advantage. A UCL study found that while 31% of private schools provided four or more live online lessons per day during lockdown, that was the case for only 6% of state schools.
Eren says he now wonders about all the other state schools that don’t send many, or any, students to Oxbridge. He told me about his old school in Croydon, an underperforming comprehensive. His old school mates have struggled to get the places they wanted. “If you go to a school that hasn’t given you all the opportunities you can have, it’s going to be harder for you,” he says. “I think there’s a loss of talent and intelligence. It’s just a waste of people.”
A longer version of this article appeared in The Guardian. © 2020 Guardian News & Media Limited.