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The Oxbridge Files. Which schools get the most pupils in?

Oxford and Cambridge have released figures showing how many offers they gave to pupils from schools in the 2020 UCAS application cycle. We have combined the figures in this table. It shows how well state grammars and sixth-form colleges compete with independent schools. Over the years, both universities have roughly doubled the proportion of pupils from state schools: 67 per cent, up from 52 per cent in 2000. Of the 80 schools, 35 are independent, 22 grammar, 15 sixth-form colleges, seven comprehensives or academies, and one is a further education college. (Schools are ranked by offers received, then by offer-to-application ratio. If schools received fewer than three offers from one

How Harris Westminster conquered Oxbridge

Westminster School is being kept on its toes by its partner sixth-form college round the corner, Harris Westminster. There’s no imminent threat yet, in the ‘How many did you get into Oxbridge?’ stakes: last year, Westminster (private, £10,497 per term for day sixth-formers) got 71 of its pupils into Oxbridge, and Harris Westminster (state, £0 per term) got 36 in from a cohort about twice the size. But watch those Oxbridge statistics draw closer to each other in the next few years, as Harris Westminster’s highly motivated and excellently taught students continue to soar, and Oxbridge colleges become ever more nervous of offering places to the (as they see it)

The secrets to brilliant teaching

‘Why not be a teacher?’ asks Thomas More in Robert Bolt’s great play A Man for All Seasons. ‘You’d be a fine teacher, perhaps a great one.’ ‘If I was, who would know it?’ says Richard Rich, the young man who betrays him. ‘You, your pupils, your friends — God,’ says More. ‘Not a bad public, that.’ I’ve been thinking about those lines a lot since the finest teacher I ever knew, Audrey Judge, died. Audrey was 93. The last time I saw her was before Covid. She died of cancer during lockdown. She taught art at Haberdashers’ Aske’s in New Cross — formerly a state grammar school, now a

Have we let exams become too important in shaping schools?

I was working in my study at Brighton College one summer term afternoon when my PA banged on the door: someone at The Spectator wanted to speak to me urgently. An animated editor burst on the line, audibly back from a very good lunch, barking: ‘What’s all this you’re saying about exams and tests squeezing scholarship and rounded learning out of schools?’ ‘Sitting exams in rows in sports halls has little bearing on what school pupils will ever do later in life,’ I spluttered, my fumbled response sufficient for him to commission an article ‘by tomorrow’. Teaching for tests, I wrote in that piece, was damaging schooling because teachers, robbed

School portraits: a snapshot of four notable schools | September 2021

Brampton manor academy This co-educational state school in Newham, east London, is setting the standard for the academies programme. With hundreds of high-achieving pupils, its selective sixth-form, which opened in 2012, has attracted attention for its stand-out Oxbridge achievements. This summer, 55 pupils secured Oxbridge places, beating Eton for the first time. The sixth-form receives around 3,000 applications for about 300 places per year, while some two out of three pupils are eligible for free school meals. One pupil puts its high achievement rates down to discipline, highlighting the rules around punctuality (there’s detention if you’re late) and a strict uniform code. Ofsted highlights the school’s ‘relentless ambition and high

The golden age of the grammar schools

Some lucky parents have already solved their school and university problems. They have managed to insert their young into state grammar schools. If all goes according to plan, they will need to pay no gigantic fees, their sons and daughters will be educated to what at least looks like a high standard, in orderly classrooms — and an increasingly anti-middle-class Oxbridge will not be prejudiced against them when they apply. I envy them, having myself spent the GDP of a small Latin American country on private education over the past three decades, with variable results. But I also increasingly wish it were not so. The anachronistic existence of a tiny

Camilla Swift

The joy of hedgerow foraging

Hedgerows are one of those things that most of us simply take for granted. Drive, walk, cycle or ride through the English countryside and you’re likely to see fields bounded by hedges, which change with the seasons. Blossoming in the spring, full of colour and berries in the autumn, and sprouting wildly thorugh the summer months. They are certainly having their moment in the sun. In the 1980s, farmers were encouraged under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy to grub them up (dig them up, in laymen’s speak) in a bid to create larger fields, and grow more food. 23 per cent of the nation’s hedgerows were lost in that decade.

The best autumn festivals to book ahead for

There is no denying that we’ve been starved of our usual festival fix this summer. Although many have managed to go ahead, we’ve missed out on some usual favourites, such as Glastonbury, Boomtown, WOMAD, Cropredy and more. It seems fitting, therefore, to look ahead to this autumn, when many festivals that have previously looked unlikely have been rescheduled to, or when other festivals will manage to go ahead without many of the restrictive social distancing rules that we’ve become so used to. There will be slight changes to many festivals this year – many event organisers have limited ticket numbers and ensured that small tents are spaced further apart, for example,

Something borrowed: the rise of the pool renter

Here’s a question for you: if you were lucky enough to own a swimming pool or a tennis court – or indeed both – would you want to rent it out per hour to the hoi polloi, the great unwashed, the General Public? Although I am not in the happy position of being able to answer this question personally, I would have thought the answer would be a hard no. No to other people’s verucas, no to other people’s splashing and cavorting in earshot, and absolutely no to other people’s children bombing into your pool all day long. I concede that tennis might be a different matter. A quick set

Halsey and the cultural appropriation of Catholicism

I can’t say I have a terribly favourable view of the modern music industry. But when I heard that pop artist Halsey’s latest album If I Can’t Have Love, I want Power had an album cover inspired by Jean Fouquet’s Virgin And Child Surrounded By Angels, taken from the right wing of the Melun Diptych, I wondered if I’d find a sequin on the threadbare fabric of popular taste. Alas, I shouldn’t have got my hopes up. The American singer’s album was released last week and the cover depicts her and a baby in a pose resembling Fouquet’s Virgin and Child, bare boob and all. Aside from the grandiose nature

Olivia Potts

Jamón Croquetas: an oozing Spanish entrée

Being deeply unchic and uncosmopolitan, for a long time I assumed that croquetas were the same as the croquettes of my childhood: potato-based, probably a bit bland, and almost certainly coming from a bag that lives in the freezer. We’d often have them served with roast ham and cider sauce and green beans, as part of a main meal. To be fair to me and my culinary shortsightedness, the two bear strong similarities: both are breadcrumbed and fried or baked, soft within, and similarly shaped and sized. But, to my mind, croquetas are several levels above the French/English potato variant. Of course, Spanish croquetas don’t contain potato at all. The

Tanya Gold

When will James Bond drive an SUV?

I once read that after watching a James Bond film men speed in their Honda Civics: they might do 35 mph in a built-up area. If this is so, it is due to the Aston Martin Bond has driven since 1964 (the DB5 in Goldfinger, a man with ‘a cold finger’). The DB5 has appeared in six Bond films so far; and some kind of Aston Martin has appeared in twelve Bond films. Is it, I wonder, contemplating Bond’s internal wasteland of sex addiction, murder and laundry, the only real home he ever had? Is it his wife? When the DB5 was revealed in Skyfall, waiting calmly in a garage, it

Jonathan Ray

The secret to drinking rum

There is surely no better way of passing the time than by doing nothing at all, fuelled by a large well-chilled drink. Nothing beats hanging out with a couple of similarly empty-headed chums in a warm patch of sun, glass in hand, watching the world go by. It turns out that those past-masters of taking it easy, the Barbadians – or Bajans – have a term for this excellent use of one’s time: liming. And given that Barbados is home to the world’s longest-established rum distillery – the peerless Mount Gay, in operation since 1703 if not before – it’s all but impossible to lime without the aid of plenty of rum.

The BBC’s strange obsession with remakes

BBC Director General Tim Davie, in his proclaimed push to create ‘landmark’ TV shows appears to be steering the Corporation in an increasingly conservative (small ‘c’) direction, intent on trading off past glories. Former soft drink marketer Davie’s lack of programming and editorial experience is often painfully apparent; he is increasingly given to sweeping crowd-pleasing statements, such as the remarks he made to the public about BBC’s staff’s attendance of Pride marches, telling staff to stop virtue-signalling on social media. Despite having spent 16 years in various senior roles at the Corporation, Davie doesn’t appear to have the antennae to pick up on the mood of his workforce. He may well believe upsetting the

Scotland is sailing’s best kept secret

Among the glorious shores of these islands, there is one of the best-kept secrets of sailing. It’s a ragged and rocky coastline that is blessed with the sort of idyllic, empty sandy beaches stretching on for miles that would make Tom Hanks’s castaway shake from method acting-induced PTSD. Here the blue waters are scattered with islands rising from the depths with the kind of muscular topography that would have your average geography teacher reaching for their colouring-in pencils. This, my friends, is the west coast of Scotland. Forget the Caribbean, wonderful though the punch, the people and the terribly reliable temperature all are. The untouched beaches of the Western Isles are

Olivia Potts

The secret to mastering strawberry ice cream

When I was first playing about with the recipe, the sun was shining. Every day was hotter than the last, and I found myself seeking out dishes that were cooling, that were fresh, and made me feel like I was on holiday. Looking ahead to when this recipe might go out I was fairly confident that it would hit the right note at the height of summer: July might have a damp day here and there, but overall, it seemed a relatively safe bet for days and nights of heat, the kind of time where there’s a sudden run on paddling pools, and ice cream becomes near medicinal. But as

It’s time we stopped treating dogs like gods

News that the gourmet dog food company Butternut Box has raised forty million pounds to expand its services in the wake of the pandemic puppy boom will surprise no one. More dogs means more chum, after all. But this isn’t just any old chum. This is gourmet dog food, the like of which you may not even sup on yourself. Founded by two former Goldman bankers, Butternut Box promises to deliver a balanced meal of chicken, turkey, fish, or lamb with vegetables to your dog, perfectly tailored to weight and calorie intake. David Nolan and Kevin Glynn who form the savvy former banking duo, even promise that someone will taste

The must-see shows on Netflix this autumn

As the nights start to draw in, it will be up to the likes of Netflix to provide that lazy autumn entertainment. Here’s our pick of what’s coming up on the streaming service over the next few months: Bruised, 24 November Two decades on from her star turn as a Bond Girl in Die Another Day, Halle Berry makes her debut in the director’s seat with her first feature film. Bruised tells the story of a scandalised cage fighter on a mission to restore her name and rebuild a relationship with the son she abandoned years earlier. Not content with just calling the shots, Berry also stars in the film too:

Simon Evans

The problem with holidays

Of all the things sacrificed to public health in the last eighteen months, I think the one I regret the least is the default poolside Summer holiday. I first began to understand something about it, and the counter intuitive aspects of human happiness, on holiday in Cozumel, off the coast of Mexico, in 1999. I was staying at an all-inclusive hotel, not the sort of thing I would normally have done, being more of a self-identified ‘traveller’ at the time, happier with ad-hoc hostels and thumbing from town to town. I immediately resented the little coloured wristband that alerted the staff to the level of service and the range of