As a first-generation immigrant, my mum’s greatest ambition for me was to get into Oxbridge. For her, it was clear that these world-leading universities would be a passport into a better world. So she’ll be aghast to learn of BBC Director General Tim Davie saying the BBC can’t ‘just take people from a certain academic track’. By which he means, according to BBC sources who have elaborated to the newspapers, that ‘it’s about not fishing in an Oxbridge gene pool’. The assumption is that these two universities are hotbeds of inherited privilege.
Davie went to Selwyn, Cambridge, in the 1980s. Back then, most students were (like him) privately educated. But I’d contend that he’s misunderstood the situation on the ground now. This year, almost 70 per cent of Oxford’s intake was from state schools, and that proportion continues to go up. Take my case, for example.
Despite her expectations being made clear to me at an early age, I’d still disappointed my tiger mum by failing to get into the local grammar school at the age of 11.
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