Don’t be fooled – you’d get into Oxford
Rachel Johnson calls to tell me she’s doing a piece for the Financial Times saying she wouldn’t have got into Oxford if she’d been applying this year. She’s quite wrong, of course. A myth has grown up among my generation of Oxford graduates that it’s harder for their children to get in than it was for them, when in fact the opposite is true.
There are two reasons why they think this. First, they mistakenly believe that getting two As and an A* in their A-levels — the standard Oxford offer today — is beyond them. This ignores the rampant grade inflation of the past 25 years. One of the most remarkable facts about this year’s batch of A-level results is that it was the first time in 14 years the percentage getting top marks didn’t increase. The proportion that got As in 1997 was 15.7 per cent, compared with 27 per cent getting As or A*s today. It’s not an exaggeration to say that two Bs and an A in the early ’80s is the equivalent of two As and an A* in today’s money.
The second reason people like Rachel are being unduly modest is because they genuinely believe that all Oxford colleges operate a form of positive discrimination that makes it virtually impossible for anyone educated at a top independent school to get in.
In fact, it’s easier to get into Oxford from a fee-paying school today than it was a quarter of a century ago. In 1983, the year I was admitted to Brasenose College, people who’d been educated in the state sector (like me) comprised approximately 65 per cent of the student body. In 2011, when this year’s successful applicants have been taken into account, the figure will be roughly 57.5 per cent.
The main reason for this is the decimation of England’s grammar and direct grant schools. When I applied to Oxford, I was in the last grammar-school year of my school, which went on to become fully comprehensive, like most of the other grammars. As a result, the percentage of Oxford students from the state sector fell off a cliff and it has only been thanks to the dogged work of the Undergraduate Admissions Office that it has slowly begun to creep back up.
One of the things most comprehensives are bad at is telling their pupils what GCSEs and A-levels they need to get to secure a place at a good university. This is clear from the declining percentage of comprehensive pupils studying the EBacc subjects — English, maths, a foreign language, two sciences and one of the humanities. In 1997, half of GCSE candidates were studying this essential core. Today, it’s fallen to 22 per cent. Instead, pupils are being steered towards subjects like ‘Personal Effectiveness’, which includes a module on how to claim the dole. Oxford no longer has any formal matriculation requirements, but it’s a safe bet that any applicant listing ‘Personal Effectiveness’ on his or her entrance form is unlikely to be offered a place.
The sad truth is that the majority of comprehensives have little interest in getting their pupils into good universities, even the brightest ones. A concrete example of this was recently documented on Thinking Aloud, the Radio 4 show presented by Laurie Taylor. He read out a letter he’d received from a listener on this topic:
Laurie, I recently spent two years teaching at a comprehensive school in one of the poorest postcodes in Britain. Towards the end of my time at the school I had a heated debate with the headteacher about plans to alter the curriculum, making certain vocational qualifications — B-techs — compulsory and not allowing the option for the more able students to take academic GCSEs in some subjects. The headteacher argued that this was not an academic school and overly academic qualifications were not relevant to these working-class children. Furthermore, we should not aspire to send the top students to elite universities because in her opinion this would cause them to become estranged from their families and communities.
Contrary to popular belief, our society hasn’t become more meritocratic in the last 25 years, but less. The members of my Oxford generation who wouldn’t get in today are not people like Rachel, who would actually find it easier, but those whose parents couldn’t afford to send them to fee-paying schools. The ladder they used to get in has been kicked away, and as a consequence Britain now languishes at the bottom of the league table measuring social mobility in the developed world.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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