Ivor Roberts

Oxford under siege

The government’s interference in university admissions is unjustified – and may yet push our strongest institutions to go it alone

The government’s interference in university admissions is unjustified – and may yet push our strongest institutions to go it alone

It is a well-worn tactic for politicians to distract attention from their own failures by picking on an outside target. Thus Nick Clegg’s recent attack on Oxford and Cambridge last month for proposing a maximum of £9,000 in tuition fees. ‘They can’t charge £9,000 unless they can prove that they can dramatically increase the number of people from poorer and disadvantaged backgrounds who presently aren’t going to Oxford and Cambridge,’ said the Deputy Prime Minister.

Let’s set aside the role Nick Clegg’s predecessors played many years ago in the dismantling of those excellent engines for social mobility, the direct grant and grammar schools. Today, thanks to the efforts of politicians, the single biggest barrier to getting socially disadvantaged children into Oxford is the lack of academic attainment in state schools. It is not some elitist determination to engineer admissions so as to exclude bright children from poor homes. As the historian Tony Judt wrote shortly before his untimely death last year, ‘politicians have foisted upon the state sector a system of enforced downward uniformity… the gap separating the quality of education received by the privately schooled minority from that of everyone else is greater than at any time since the 1940s.’ It is as though one generation, having climbed the ladder of social mobility, kicked it away from the next.

At Oxford, where I work, we have a different take on being elitist. We want to maintain ourselves as a world-class university by taking the very best, whatever their background. This does not mean, as Nick Clegg seems to suggest, an Oxford dominated by rich Brideshead wannabes. In fact, 10 per cent of the UK undergraduates at Oxford come from households with an income of less than £16,000, which is the threshold for our largest bursaries and fee waivers.

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