The culture wars have crept into Oxbridge admissions

The characters in Sarah Vaughan’s thriller Anatomy of a Scandal include rich Oxford undergraduates from Eton whose main preoccupations are drinking and trashing rooms. They are what it is fashionable to call ‘privileged white males’; while the typical female Oxbridge student is ‘slim, tall, well dressed. Entitled… they knew they belonged there’. The truth, however, is that although Eton is one of the top academic schools in the country, its ‘beaks’ are puzzled by the sharp reduction in the number of their brightest pupils gaining places at Oxbridge. The number of offers has halved between 2014 and 2021.

Not very different to Vaughan’s narrative is the argument of the Sutton Trust that we have a problem when 65 per cent of court judges were educated at independent schools. But some of these were at school half a century ago, in a very different educational setting. Much depends anyway on how the statistics are framed. Do such figures include the half-and-half category of direct grant schools, most of which are now independent but which admitted very large numbers of state-supported scholars?

Stephen Toope, vice-chancellor of Cambridge University, said last week that ‘we have to make it very, very clear we are intending to reduce over time the number of people who are coming from independent school backgrounds into places like Oxford or Cambridge’. Actually, the colleges, not the university, choose whom to admit, but the selection of state school candidates in place of well-qualified competitors from private schools has been going on for a long time; it has simply become more obvious in the past few years. The university’s target figure for state school candidates has slowly crept upwards beyond three-quarters; but it was originally announced as a target (or, to use the current euphemism, ‘benchmark’), not a quota – I know because I was a member of the University Council then, and we were assured that what would always count in final consideration was candidates’ excellence.