Hugh Rayment-Pickard
David Lammy MP received quite a bit of stick for his comments about the lack of black students at Oxbridge. I spoke to a socially-minded friend who teaches at Cambridge who was uncharacteristically angry about what he saw as the misrepresentation of the data.
The line being taken is that it is hardly the universities' fault if the quality of black students is not up to scratch and that pressure needs to be put on the school system rather than the well-meaning universities.
Surely this isn't an adequate response. Quotas for black students may not be the answer, but there are plenty of other things that Oxbridge can be doing to diversify its intake.
In the nineteenth century, Oxford and Cambridge had outreach settlements into the toughest inner-city areas: for example, Oxford House in Bethnal Green. It is perhaps time now for the universities to think how they can engage with disadvantaged communities in a more determined and ambitious way.
And it is not just for the sake of black students. The Sutton Trust reported over Christmas that pupils on free school meals are 55 times less likely to go to Cambridge or Oxford than those from private schools. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-12048629. Can any Oxbridge college really remain sanguine reading this statistic?
It has to be said that as a former Schools Liaison Officer for a Cambridge I agree to an extent with your friend who teaches at Cambridge.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with David Lammy's comments (and perhaps more pertinently the way they were picked up) is that they focus on numbers of admissions rather than ratios of admissions to applications. Far more shocking than the low number of black students is the low number of applications.
Of course, this is precisely what WP efforts at the two universities set out to rectify. But even these efforts shouldn't necessarily be judged on such straightforward statistics. Having been responsible for the WP work in Tower Hamlets and Hackney for Cambridge I've seen first hand the extent of the problem. In Tower Hamlets, for example, 50% of those who enter HE go to just one of 5 universities: Queen Mary's, UEL, London MET, Greenwich and Westminster. We were measuring success in our WP work, and particularly our 6th Form Mentoring Scheme, on the shift from a desire to attend local universities to considering studying outside London or even travelling as far afield as UCL!
Lammy's comments is problematic because it doesn't recognise the success of Oxbridge's WP, which often ends up impacting upon individuals without affecting their own stats. Obviously that is always the long term, but in the meantime it's often much more altruistic (in that there is no direct benefit to the university).
Perhaps talking positively about these two universities' efforts wouldn't go amiss. Doing so might mean that comments such as Lammy's, which I fear undermine the successes achieved by themselves dissuading applications from non-traditional backgrounds, might just become a thing of the past.