Criticism over Truss’s A* Oxbridge interview pledge

LIZ TRUSS has been accused of “micromanagement” by a major teaching union over her pledge to give all students who receive three A*s at A-level an automatic Oxbridge interview.

Ms Truss said Oxford and Cambridge should give all top students a chance for a place, as she warned some teachers discourage applications because the universities are “full of toffs”.

The Foreign Secretary also suggested she supported delaying university admissions until after students have received their exam results, abandoning the system of applications based on predicted grades.

But Geoff Barton, the general secretary of one of Britain’s leading teaching unions, said the reforms amounted to “micromanagement” of admissions.

“The idea that suddenly in a system that is predicated on predictions rather than post-qualification results, that all those young people are going to be guaranteed by the universities an interview probably isn’t being supremely well received by the universities who might well think this smacks of micromanagement,” he told The Telegraph.

“There is a tendency to think that we in the centre know better how to run things, including apparently telling Oxford and Cambridge how they should select students for their courses.”

Ms Truss told The Sunday Times that the Roundhay School in Leeds, which she attended, did not always encourage top students to apply to Oxbridge.

“What I found at my school was that you had to put yourself forward. There were supportive teachers but there were also other teachers who said Oxford is full of toffs,” she said.

“There’s a lot of evidence that women are less likely to ask for a promotion and actually one of the best ways of making the system fairer is to identify the people that are talented and ask them if they want that opportunity.”