How Britain’s private schools lost their grip on
Oxbridge
As state-school admissions rise at elite universities,
some parents who shelled out for private education regret it
© Edmon de
Haro
Brooke
Masters JULY 2 2021
“Five years
ago, my son would have got a place at Oxford. But now the bar has shifted and
he didn’t,” says my friend, a City of London executive who has put several
children through elite private schools in Britain. “I think he got
short-changed.”
I’ve been
hearing this more and more from fellow parents with kids at top day and
boarding schools in recent years. Some of it sounds like whining: most of us
like to think the best of our progeny. But my friend has a point. After years
of hand-wringing about unequal access to elite higher education, admissions
standards are finally shifting.
A decade
ago, parents who handed over tens of thousands of pounds a year for the likes
of Eton College, St Paul’s School or King’s College School in Wimbledon could
comfortably assume their kids had a very good chance of attending Oxford or
Cambridge, two of the best universities in the world. A 2018 Sutton Trust study
showed that just eight institutions, six of them private, accounted for more
Oxbridge places than 2,900 other UK secondary schools combined. When the
headmaster of Westminster School boasted at an open evening that half the sixth
form went on to Oxbridge, approving murmurs filled the wood-panelled hall. (I
was there.)
But growing
anger about inequality, rising applications from an improved state sector and a
flood of international students have prompted Oxford and Cambridge to rethink.
They give more credit to students who have overcome barriers on their way to
top grades. This means that fewer middling private school students who have
been groomed to excel at interviews are getting in.
“We want to
select the academically most able — the really strong candidates versus those
that are average but have been well-prepared,” says Samina Khan, Oxford’s
director of undergraduate admissions.
This is
surely fair. But it also means that hothouse independent schools are losing
their edge. At St Paul’s, I heard one grouchy father press the high master to
explain how he would protect the boys there from “social engineering”.
What should
parents do when a policy that is good for society seems bad for their kids? I
feel genuine sympathy for anyone concerned for their child’s future, but
complaining about a loss of privilege comes across as tone deaf.
At Eton,
attended by 20 UK prime ministers including the current one, the number of
Oxbridge offers dropped from 99 in 2014 to 48 this year. At King’s College,
Wimbledon, offers have fallen by nearly half in two years to 27, The Sunday
Times reported in February. Both schools still sit near the top of the national
league tables for total offers. But their students are finding it harder to get
in, rankling parents who shell out up to £28,000 a year for day school or
£44,000 for boarding.
The anger
of wealthy, mostly white parents about losing the advantages they expected to
be able to buy their children is part of a broader pattern of status anxiety
among some sections of the British and American upper classes. It is out of
step with reality: children from such backgrounds will typically enjoy greater
opportunities and financial security throughout their lives.
Nevertheless,
the potency of this anxiety was on display in the US during 2019’s “Varsity
Blues” admissions scandal when actors and private equity giants were jailed for
trying to buy their kids into Yale and Stanford, among others, with faked
entrance test results and counterfeit athletic skills.
“When you
have something that is very valuable to people, the system gets distorted,”
says Daniel Markovits, a Yale law professor and author of The Meritocracy Trap.
“Attending these universities makes a difference in people’s income and
status . . . The parents see how much it costs them to live in the
neighbourhoods they live in and send children to private schools, and they
realise that their children will be in the same bind.”
Outside the wealthiest sections of British society,
the main critique of Oxbridge admissions is about too little inclusion, not too
much © Edmon de Haro
For
decades, some UK private schools traded on their high Oxbridge admission rate
to help justify their astronomical and constantly rising fees. If that bargain
no longer stands, what are they selling parents instead?
“Knowing
what I know now, I would absolutely reconsider my decision” to choose elite
boarding schools, the City executive tells me. “The fees are absolutely out of
whack with reality.” He even worries that he has disadvantaged his offspring.
At his global workplace, he says, applicants who attended top independent
schools are treated with a “certain amount of sniffiness. ‘Oh those guys got
such a good education, of course they did well. We need someone hungrier.’”
Another
parent, who attended Oxford but saw an Eton-educated son rejected, frets that
attending a top independent school “has become a label that stays with you for
life and it’s not a good label. It clearly means that when they are applying
for university or jobs, they are at a disadvantage unless they are truly
brilliant.”
Sam Lucy,
an archeologist who specialises in Roman and Anglo-Saxon Britain, has served as
an admissions tutor at Cambridge since 2009. She has little truck with parents
who claim their children are getting the short end of the stick. “Nobody is
entitled to get into Cambridge. You have to earn your place by being serious
about your subject and going above and beyond the school curriculum. No one
should expect to get in, but if they do, they will have deserved it.”
Now
director of admissions, Lucy has been asked so many times why smart students
are getting turned down that she carries a chart that illustrates what has
changed. Since 1981, annual applications to Cambridge have risen from just
under 5,000 to 20,426 last year.
Highly
selective state sixth forms such as Harris Westminster and Brampton Manor in
London have sprung up, partly to prepare children from disadvantaged
backgrounds for Oxbridge and other top universities. They not only produce
students with high exam scores and impressive essays, but also train them for
interviews, an area where posh schools have long excelled.
In 2021, 55
students at Brampton Manor secured conditional Oxbridge offers, exceeding
Eton’s 48; most have ethnic minority backgrounds, receive free school meals or
were the first in their family to apply for university. Cambridge and Oxford
have also had a big increase in overseas applications.
Meanwhile,
the two universities, which promise small group teaching by dons and rooms in
ancient stone quadrangles, have not expanded appreciably. That means it is
roughly four times harder now to get one of the 6,800 places than it was when
today’s parents were applying. “That’s the mismatch in expectations. Parents
say, ‘I got in and you are as clever as me. Why haven’t they made you an
offer?’” Lucy says.
Outside the
wealthiest sections of British society, the main critique of Oxbridge
admissions is about too little inclusion, not too much. Some Cambridge colleges
failed to admit a single black student between 2012 and 2016, and most
state-sector students historically came from selective grammar schools or
wealthy areas.
“The upper
classes have a vice-like grip on Oxford admissions that they will not willingly
give up,” Labour MP David Lammy proclaimed in 2018 as he led a campaign for
change that helped inspire rapper Stormzy to fully fund two scholarships for
black students at Cambridge.
Several of
the elite UK private schools were established in the late middle ages to
provide free schooling to gifted boys from poorer backgrounds. Over the
centuries, fee-paying pupils became more numerous and they took off as training
grounds for the establishment and the administration of the British Empire.
Today,
private schools educate 6.5 per cent of UK children, but as recently as five
years ago they accounted for 42 per cent of Oxford’s domestic intake and 37 per
cent at Cambridge. Since then, the private school share has fallen sharply but
it is still three in 10. That has sparked resentment among fee-paying parents
without assuaging diversity campaigners. “It catches parents in a dilemma,”
says Mark Bailey, a former high master of St Paul’s who now lectures at the
University of East Anglia. “They may be committed to broad notions of social
justice in the workplace and society, yet here is a situation where that
aspiration cuts against them.”
Independent
school parents point out that state-private ratios that compare Oxbridge offers
to the total stock of UK students are misleading. Oxford and Cambridge
generally won’t look at students unless they have at least three A or A* grades
at A-level, and private schools churned out one of every four of them before
the pandemic.
Those
results are a key reason parents shell out school fees. “Why the heck would
anyone ever pay the thick end of half a million quid (aged 4-18) per child
pre-tax to send them to private school if it didn’t give them seriously better
grades than someone equally bright who went state?” asked one person on
Mumsnet, the online parenting forum.
For decades, some UK private schools traded on their
high Oxbridge admission rate to help justify their astronomical and constantly
rising fees. If that deal no longer stands, what are they selling parents
instead? © Edmon de Haro
Within the
pool of high-achieving applicants, the Oxbridge colleges now rely on
“contextual admissions” that look at how students have arrived at their top
marks. “If someone has done really well despite being in care, that tells you
something about their ability,” says Oxford’s Khan. “State schools are doing so
much better, particularly in London. We are getting much stronger candidates
than we used to. It is getting more competitive for everyone.”
Few private
school parents openly dispute the need for this approach. They just hate the
impact on their own children. “I agree we need social justice, but the problem
needs to be fixed much earlier,” says a St Paul’s mother, who has donated
generously to bursary funds that bring less-privileged boys to the school.
“These [private school] kids are all really bright and it is unfair to penalise
them at this point.”
Of course,
not all parents who choose private schools do so expecting their kids will win
a top university place. Many are drawn by their exceptional facilities and low
student-to-staff ratios. “We never had set in our mind that our kids would be
going to Oxbridge or an equivalent,” says Catherine May, who sent two boys to
City of London School. “I’ve loved that we have well-rounded children and we
were very grateful for the excellent pastoral leadership.”
I attended
one of the US’s elite private schools 35 years ago. I and roughly half of the
class went on to Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League. These days, the school
is still a top Ivy feeder, but that share is down below 30 per cent. Most of
Harvard’s undergraduate class is non-white (reflecting the US high-school
population) and 55 per cent of undergraduates receive financial aid.
But there
are two dirty little secrets that explain why so many springtime posts on my
Facebook feed feature parents on the other side of the Atlantic boasting about
their children’s college destinations. Top American universities still offer
“alumni preference” — children of graduates don’t always get in but they have a
much higher acceptance rate — and they of course find spaces for children of
big donors. There is a back door for the 0.1 per cent and the well-connected,
if not the merely wealthy. Oxford and Cambridge resolutely reject this. Cynics
will tell you this is evident in their shabbier facilities and shallower donor
pools.
All of
which puts the heads of the UK’s elite independent schools in a bind. On the
one hand, they are under pressure to justify their tax-exempt status by
improving access for poor and minority students, either by offering more
bursaries or helping state schools in their neighbourhoods. On the other hand,
they must also please their paying customers. And that means preserving their
effectiveness at university admissions.
“We feel
quite irritated by politicians who bang on about independent-state school ratios,”
says Barnaby Lenon, a former head of Harrow School who now chairs the
Independent Schools Council. “One-third of the most needy bursary students at
Oxbridge are from independent schools and the top state grammar schools are
stuffed with wealthy parents.”
Optimists
hope that the changing admissions profile will reduce the outsize hold Oxbridge
has on the UK’s psyche and its politics. “If more and more really talented kids
are pushed to other universities, the reputation of those schools will rise. That’s
really valuable for society,” says the Eton parent.
And indeed,
many top independent schools now are scrambling to prove they can smooth the
path for their students to other brand-name options inside the UK and,
increasingly, abroad. They are hiring admissions officers who are experts not
only in the requirements for US universities, such as SAT tests, but also for
other hot destinations such as Trinity College Dublin, McGill University in
Montreal and Bocconi University in Milan.
St Paul’s
and St Paul’s Girls’ School even employ recent graduates of top American
universities as “Colet Fellows” to coach students through writing the personal
essays favoured by the Ivy League. “The obsession with Oxbridge misses the
point,” says Sarah Fletcher, SPGS’s high mistress. “Our job is to genuinely
guide people to the right schools.” This year, total UK applications to US
universities shot up 23 per cent.
That may
well be the right choice for students who are attracted to American
institutions’ liberal arts approach, which allows them to take a wider range of
subjects, Lenon says. But, he adds, “it is not good for the UK if we send too
many of our best students abroad because a proportion never come back.”
For
independent schools, the growing emphasis on international admissions is all
part of the expertise they sell. Consider their mastery of the Oxbridge
admissions process, which requires students to apply to a specific college for
a specific subject. The elite independent schools maximise acceptance numbers
by dispersing applications away from the most oversubscribed subjects and
colleges. That helped give the strongest schools an Oxbridge success rate of at
least 33 per cent last year.
Then
Covid-19 struck and A-levels were cancelled. Oxford and Cambridge had already
made their offers, but they were caught up in the chaos. After schools assessed
their students, the exams watchdog fed the results through an algorithm that
reduced nearly 40 per cent of grades. Universities revoked thousands of
conditional offers, with disadvantaged students hit worst.
When the
government U-turned, restoring the teacher-assessed grades, Oxford and
Cambridge found themselves with hundreds of extra students, driving total
acceptances up 12 per cent to 7,692. “I still have no idea how colleges managed
to find enough rooms to turn into bedrooms, but thankfully they did, so we
didn’t need to insist that anyone defer,” Lucy says.
The bulge
and another year of cancelled A-levels have put admissions tutors under
pressure — teacher-assessed marks will probably produce grade inflation, but
the facilities cannot accommodate another supersized class.
So they are
making fewer offers — at Oxford, just 3,541 for 3,300 places, down from 3,932
last year. “The landscape is more competitive than it has ever been,” says
David Goodhew, head of Latymer Upper School in west London. “High-flyers are
still getting offers but universities were uber cautious because they got their
fingers burnt last year.”
Some
private school parents worry that admissions tutors, faced with a plethora of
candidates with high predicted grades, will focus on improving their diversity
statistics. They point to the lower offer numbers at the elite schools. “These
great kids with flawless records are getting turned away not just by Oxbridge
but Durham?” says the St Paul’s mother. “How can that be?”
At Hills
Road, a selective state sixth-form college in Cambridge that gets similar offer
numbers to Westminster, Jo Trump, principal, says that she is seeing slightly
more Oxbridge offers to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Now in her
fourth year as principal, Trump has spent years trying to convince ambitious
parents — some of them Cambridge dons — that it is not the end of the world if
their children do not get into Oxbridge.
“Things
have changed very dramatically in 30 years,” she says. For parents, “it’s about
learning to let go a bit and learning to let students drive the
process . . . Our job is to walk alongside them. It is not to go in front and
drag them.”
Brooke
Masters is the FT’s chief business commentator
Data visualisation by Alan Smith
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