the Sackville students

 

As last spring turned into summer, my Tuesday morning volunteering gig was occupying more of my thoughts. I would email ideas to De Souza and Valentine at 1am, while watching Netflix. I used my group chat of university friends to answer questions about courses, colleges and future careers. Two of them took a day off work to do practice interviews, meeting the students one by one. At the end of each interview, I could hear them give the same pep talk: we think you’re good enough for this, so believe in yourself.

 

When I visited the school, De Souza, Valentine and I would sit in Valentine’s office next to the sixth-form study room at lunchtime, drinking coffee and making plans. It had become a team effort that energised a handful of staff, and it was exciting. We felt these kids were going to do well, and they deserved to. The teachers had worked with most of the students for half a decade, and they deserved it, too.

 

On a beautiful, sunny day in June, my former tutor at Cambridge agreed to show the students around the London university list. He gave them tips for their applications, and subjected me to a rapid-fire mock interview in his office to show the students what their own interviews might be like.

 

On the bus back, the pupils chatted about Love Island, debating who was more of a snake, Maura or Mollie-Mae. I wasn’t sure how they would respond to the visit, but looking back, Valentine says it was a turning point. “They felt they had a really good chance,” she says. “There were no more tears and drama after that. We felt that something was in our grasp, that something special could happen this year.” Eren says it was the visit that convinced him to apply: it had made an unrealistic prospect seem real.

 

***

 

Around the time that the Sackville students were putting the final touches to their applications, Dr Marchella Ward, the outreach fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, was challenging her colleagues with a radical proposal. Ward, whose job it is to attract a wider cohort of students to the college, wanted to make this year’s intake – the ones starting their courses this month – “genuinely representative”. She resolved that the students who got offers from Worcester should look like the students nationwide who achieve AAA and above at A-level, in terms of their schools and economic backgrounds.

 

That meant persuading the college’s admissions tutors to focus on how they were assessing potential in students; to figure out why they were admitting a lot of privileged candidates. One of the key areas they looked at was personal statements – the one-page sales pitch that every applicant has to submit via the Ucas system. As all 21 university advisers at St Paul’s know, there is a particular skill to writing a personal statement for an elite university. It involves a certain type of showing off: talking about a 1971 lecture you came across by a Nobel prize-winning chemist; or linking something you studied at A-level to a review you read in the Times Literary Supplement (which you most definitely did not come across at school). Making those kinds of references suggests to admissions tutors that you are a highly engaged, impressively self-directed learner who will thrive at universities where embracing the specific and the obscure is a way of life.

 

It’s the oldest trick in the book, and Ward wanted her college to stop falling for it. She felt strongly that the college was missing out on outstanding students in favour of ones who were better coached. “It was about asking tutors to think really hard about what it was that was making them impressed,” she says. “We’ve got to be thinking carefully about why we think potential looks that way.”

 

When it came to targets, Ward wanted Worcester to move away from thinking about simple binary metrics like state or private school, which she says can always be gamed. Instead she asked her colleagues to pay particular attention to a new dashboard of “contextual” data, provided by the university to its colleges about all Oxford applicants, which ranked every student by factors like what percentage of their school is on free school meals. “It’s about assessing potential in a way that takes all sorts of advantage into account,” she tells me.

 

 In Tower Hamlets, you’re practically chased down the street by social mobility charities. But in Norfolk there is nobody

By mid-January this year, we knew our efforts at Sackville had paid off. Every student in our group had offers from universities such as Durham, Imperial, LSE, Edinburgh, Manchester and UCL. And then, while I was driving along the motorway on a grey and drizzly morning, I saw an email from Valentine: Isabelle had an offer to read Earth sciences at Oxford – with grades of A*AA. And Grace, another of our applicants, had been accepted by Oxford to study geography, having taken her A-levels last year.

 

I pulled into the next service station, sat down in a Starbucks to read it again, and messaged my friends Shyam and Frankie, who since doing the practice interviews had become almost as invested as me. I punched the air several times, and worried that the man at the next table would see I had tears in my eyes.

 

Valentine was on a school trip in Hamburg with Sackville’s headteacher, Julian Grant. “I can only describe it as like an election night, when you’re sitting up waiting for the seats to come in,” she remembers. “I realised it meant an awful lot to very many of us.” She kept refreshing her phone, watching Ucas Track, the website where university offers show up, until the news came through that both Lucy and Eren had offers from Cambridge. “We really felt very proud for the school,” Valentine says. “There was a feeling of elation, first and foremost, for the students, and for you, and for ourselves as well.”