Closing the gap between state and independent education

I do hope that Oxford will finally be free from government claims of snobbery soon. We learn today that the proportion of state school pupils it admits has fallen from 55.4 percent to 53.9 percent – but, as the university says, this is in line with the (appallingly low) proportion of state school pupils achieving three As. The problem lies with the schools, not the universities, and it helps no one to pretend otherwise.

Here’s one figure that you won’t read in the ongoing “Oxford snobbery” story: in 1969, only 38 per cent of Oxford’s places went to privately-educated children. Why? Because the private schools in those days were not places of educational excellence, but of social preference. The decline of state education, relative to private, is the problem here. Chris Patten put it well in his statement yesterday:

“I would always strongly resist the suggestion that at a university like Oxford – not that there are many – we should abandon a meritocratic test imaginatively applied in favour of social engineering.