Two programmes, two very different worlds, and all in the space of a Sunday afternoon. Imogen Stubbs gave us a Radio 4 moment when she used the network to campaign against those personal statement forms which young students have to write as part of their applications to colleges and universities. The instruction booklet (or guidance for parents) obtainable from Ucas (the centralised organisation otherwise known as Universities and Colleges Admissions Service) suggests that this is an opportunity for the prospective candidate ‘to demonstrate their enthusiasm and commitment and, above all, ensure that they stand out from the crowd’. Orwell would have been horrified by the use of that meaningless cliché. How can they all ‘stand out’? And from ‘what crowd’?
Stubbs set out to undermine the process by asking a sixth-form head and a retired judge to write a statement for an imaginary candidate in law, which she would then submit to the scrutiny of an admissions tutor at Southampton School of Law. She chose law because law courses, currently, are besieged by students: at Southampton, there are eight candidates for every place and the admissions tutor has to read through 300 admissions every day during the rush for places before Christmas. There are no interviews; the personal statement is crucial. Candidates are requested to give their reasons for their application, and to explain their suitability for the course, in just 4,000 characters including spaces, or about 600 words (a couple of paragraphs shorter than this column).
I can remember having to do it, but never dreamed of asking for any help, and especially not from my parents. Back then, at 17+, we trusted to our own passion, our own desire to get a place, and more than a bit to fate — if we didn’t get in, we weren’t meant to. Nowadays, in their quest for success, many candidates secure the help of teachers and parents, or, more unwisely, the internet. Last year 29,228 personal statements were caught by Ucas’s anti-plagiarism software as having been downloaded in part or in total from the web. There are even companies now who blatantly offer to write your personal statement for you at a cost of £96 for three-day delivery, or £273 if you have left it so late you need something to arrive in your inbox the same day.
Stubbs herself cobbled together a series of quotes from Aristotle and Shakespeare in her mock statement for an imaginary student who came from a troubled, although moneyed family, who had been expelled from one school and run away from another. Neither her statement nor those provided by the judge and the teacher satisfied the admissions tutor. ‘This is absolute rubbish,’ declared the judge afterwards about the process. But actually their failure proved that the system does work. Their statements were too polished, too mature, too much shaped by their life experience. Something a bit rough-and-ready, but full of flair and passion should surely be a better guarantee of a place?
Resourcefulness is the key. Finding a way to impress through your own character, thoughts, ideas. Paul Mason took a trip to the slums of Manila in the Philippines to investigate what makes those communities, blighted by dire poverty and extreme living conditions, function, and whether we in the highly developed countries of the West can learn anything from them. In Slums 101 (Radio 4) we heard the stories of the incredibly resourceful people who find themselves living in tunnels, alongside muddy canals, under motorway bridges, beside the rubbish tips. Without clean water, light, heat, any of the benefits of modern life, they yet survive.
We heard the giggling and splashing of a group of children who had somehow erected an inflatable swimming pool in the four-foot-wide tunnel where they lived. Once their fun was over, they swept away the water and dismantled the pool themselves. They worked together to make their own fun.
‘Jaunty’ is the word that Mason used to describe the communities he visited, and on radio we heard lots of laughter, and no complaints. There’s a danger, though, in acknowledging the incredible capacity of the poor to survive, to adapt, to create communities with their own churches, shops, credit systems, schools and sanitation. Who would want to perpetuate such extreme living, embedded in the dirt and detritus of city life?
Back in the 19th century, the policy of governments and do-gooders was to clear the slums, build social housing. Yet cities like Manila have become dependent on the slum-dwellers, who clear the rubbish, sort the recycling, clean the streets and wash up the dishes. If you move them into specially built housing developments away from the city, you’ll have to find them paid work, or bus them in to do the jobs that will otherwise get left undone.
Now here’s a set question for all those students wanting to write effective, place-winning personal statements. How would you incorporate the lessons of slum-life into British social policy?
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