Britain’s best universities are dominated by private schools. Could I help level the playing field

 If you want a place at one of Britain’s top universities, you need to beat a lot of very well-prepared, expensively educated young people to get it. A recent report showed that almost half the schools that teach the most privileged 20% of students in the country – mostly private schools and grammars – have at least one dedicated “university adviser”. St Paul’s in London has 12 teachers who are trained as “UK university advisers and has ukuniversity courses too ”also  nine staff who act as “counsellors and support staff for US university applications”, according to the school’s website.

 

And if wealthy parents aren’t content with what their school is giving them, they often top it up with private tutors. “Parents normally say, ‘I need someone who has graduated from that course in the past few years,’” the head of a leading tutoring agency in London tells me. “If you are applying for PPE at Oxford, we will find tutors who have done that course.”

 

A new book, Social Mobility And Its Enemies, calls this “education’s dark side” and argues that parents are engaging in an “ever-escalating educational arms race”. Lee Elliot Major, the book’s co-author and a professor of social mobility at Exeter University, tells me that in an increasingly complex admissions process, there are big advantages for applicants who know “the rules of the game” – including the subtle art of tailoring your personal statement.

 

 It’s hard for state schools to gear up, because they only get one student into Oxbridge every five years

It goes without saying that most state schools don’t have the time or resources to offer this kind of preparation. A school like Sackville gets £4,000 a year to educate each member of its sixth form, a small fraction of most private school fees. Teachers spend most of their time teaching or preparing for class.

 

“Teachers could go and learn the rules of the game at various careers conferences,” says Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, “but do they have time? The conferences I speak at are full of private-school teachers, often ones who are dedicated to uni preparation.” The result is that entry to the most sought-after universities is utterly dominated by private schools, and a narrow group of state schools that are either highly selective, or have a long tradition of getting students into elite universities, or both.

 

Admissions data obtained by the Guardian from Oxford and Cambridge under freedom of information laws illustrates this clearly. Both universities made about half of their undergraduate offers to state school students in the past few years, with the remainder split roughly evenly between private school and overseas applicants. But the vast majority of the state school offers – more than two-thirds – went to just 300 schools. These schools represent the highest-performing 10% of state schools in the country and are mostly grammar schools, highly selective sixth-form colleges or academies in wealthy areas. They average around five Cambridge offers a year, and four from Oxford, so have plenty of experience in getting the best students in.

 

Students from the remaining 90% of state schools – roughly 2,700 – get significantly fewer Oxbridge offers. On average, students from these schools, which include most regular comprehensives like Sackville, get an offer from Cambridge once every four years, and an offer from Oxford every five years. And before anyone dismisses this disparity on the grounds that these schools aren’t applying: the figures show that at least one student at most of this country’s schools and colleges applies to Oxford or Cambridge every year.

 

When top universities boast about their state school intakes, it’s easy to forget this silent majority of frozen-out schools, where the students who get in are statistical outliers. Or, as one of my friends put it when I worked out the figures: “That’s a pretty sad state of affairs for anything resembling a meritocracy.” And when it comes to university applications, failure begets failure, according to Sir Peter Lampl, founder of social mobility charity the Sutton Trust. “It’s hard for state schools to gear up, because they only get one student in every five years,” he says.

 

That isn’t a bad description of what had been happening at Sackville. The daunting challenge was to help the school jump from the forgotten 90% into the tiny elite.