One student’s gain is another’s loss – that can’t be right
My 15-year-old is in Iceland on a school trip, where she’s admired geysers by day and the aurora borealis by night, apparently.
That’s “apparently” because the only text I’ve had was a round robin from her teacher. She is clearly too immersed in the experience to get in touch, which is how it should be. I s’pose. Anyway, it’s geological – geographical – heaven and, as that’s one of her favourite subjects, I hope she’ll come back as fired up as a geothermal power station and ready to tackle her GCSES.
She’s due back at the weekend, by which time I shall have tidied away all the newspapers, including this one, lest she comes across the incendiary concept of “contextualisation” and expects an academic leg-up on the grounds that she attends a state school. In the inner city.
Frankly I wish I’d never heard of “contextualisation”. Really I do, because it’s yet another divisive educational hot potato to add to the whole post-colonial-literary-whitewashmeets-anti-brexit-mud-slinging-with-atwist-of-unacceptable-elitism.
Except this issue actually matters. The issue of whether students from challenging backgrounds and beleaguered comprehensives ought to have allowances made for the “context” of their hard-won grades is genuinely important; to our children, to other people’s children, to the future of tertiary-level education in this country.
The respected Sutton Trust, which campaigns among other things for greater social mobility and diversity in education, has mooted that contextualisation be made central to the university admissions process.
Students from disadvantaged backgrounds should, trust chairman Sir Peter Lampl insists, be asked for A-levels two grades below the offer made to “privileged” candidates, for example ABB instead of AAA.
That would lead to a 50 per cent increase in the number of pupils eligible for free school meals admitted to top universities.
Only a braying Bullingdon Club boy would dispute that greater access to the top levels of academia for clever kids is a good thing. But, as is the way of the world, one would-be student’s gain is another would-be student’s loss.
Selectivity has been happening under the radar piecemeal at top universities for years, of course – it’s the reason why students are, in theory at least, made individual offers. Promising, rounded candidates with sporting ability or a track record of charity work (preferably carried out in UK drizzle, rather than as part of a glorified gap year jaunt) may be offered slightly lower grades than exam drones who have little to offer other than a facility for stacking up A*s. But not enough of those candidates are from disadvantaged or low-income socio-economic groups. Indeed, research reveals that, on average, those discretionary “contextualised” offers were only a quarter of a grade lower than the standard offer.
Figures just published show that 82 per cent of Oxbridge offers are currently made to applicants in the top two social classes, compared to 79 per cent in 2010 and 77 per cent in 2004-09. They also revealed Oxbridge makes more offers to applicants from four of the Home Counties than the whole of the north of England.
That can’t be right, by any measure. But it raises a quandary. Is it fair to redress the balance by penalising young people for attending top schools? No, it is not. Yet what of those who attended inadequate state schools? Should they be expected to suffer the educational consequences? No, that’s not right either.
You don’t need to have seen Good
Will Hunting to know that brilliance can come from the most unexpected quarters. But I also know parents who have scrimped and saved, sacrificed holidays, cars and a social life to send their children to the best school they can afford so they can reach their potential and maximise their chances of getting into a Russell Group university.
And therein lies the crux of the matter. Universities are left picking up the pieces of an education system that should remain a source of shame to successive governments of every hue. It is in the classroom that children are inspired to reach the country’s gilded lecture halls and too many of our schools are so unfit for purpose the wonder is that parents don’t sue. In January of this year official figures showed 282 secondary schools are failing their pupils across Britain. That’s 200,000 pupils. In Knowsley, Merseyside, every single one of its schools was dubbed failing.
Our best universities should be seats of excellence. In an ideal world they ought to be glittering meritocracies. But the truth is that unless they identify and reach out to those bright, able students hobbled by adversity and stymied by schools where teachers spend more time breaking up fights than solving simultaneous equations, they do us all a grave disservice.
As a number of education experts point out, Ivy League universities such as Harvard and Yale have been successfully cherry-picking disadvantaged students for years without any obvious lapse in standards.
The long-awaited (hear our fingers drumming impatiently, Mrs May) expansion of grammar schools should help on this side of the water but – shockingly – there seems no sense of urgency. And the truth is, until we have something approaching a level playing field, a bit more contextualisation is going to be the least worst option, even though it’s an essentially obfuscatory term ripe for satire.
If this nuance and second-guessing is beyond human grasp, we must devise a dazzling algorithm that will allow universities to be discriminating without, ahem, discrimination.
Where is Good Will Hunting when you need him? Oh, I forgot, he’s working as an Oxbridge janitor.
Too many schools are so unfit for purpose, the wonder is that parents don’t sue