who is Elliot Major?

Eren got his offer to study natural sciences at Cambridge via email on his phone first thing in the morning, feeling “as psyched as you can be when you’ve just woken up”. He put a screenshot on his family WhatsApp group. “I think my mum replied first – she was quite chuffed. I think she just said, ‘Well done’, and probably made a joke about posh people.” His dad called him from his office. “He was crying a bit. He said he had told all his friends from work.”

 

Ayo was offered a place at Stanford, majoring in economics. The final list of offers felt almost unreal; overall, twice as many Sackville students as the year before had offers from Russell Group universities.

 

What does it prove? “I think the interesting thing about your story is that it puts a big question mark over the admission practices of these universities,” says Nick Hillman, who was an adviser to the former universities minister David Willetts. “The kids who got in, Oxbridge obviously thinks are good enough. And previously Oxbridge would never have found out about them.”

 

Duncan Exley, former director of the Equality Trust, says he isn’t surprised, either. He points out that social mobility charities like the Brilliant Club, Into University and the Sutton Trust have shown “measurable results” from mentoring talented state school students. But that support is unevenly spread. One of the people interviewed in Exley’s new book, The End of Aspiration? Social Mobility And Our Children’s Fading Prospects, told him: “If you are a kid in Tower Hamlets, you are practically chased down the street by social mobility charities. But in rural Norfolk, there is nobody.”

 

Marchella Ward’s efforts at Worcester also bore fruit. She says 83% of the college’s offers went to state school students and 20% went to students from areas with low progress rates into higher education, both comfortably above the percentages from those groups who get AAA or above. Several Oxford colleges have asked her to explain how she did it. After thousands of A-level students were downgraded in this year’s exam fiasco, Worcester was the first Oxbridge college to say it would honour its existing offers.

 

Between Sackville and Worcester, you have two different approaches to solving the problem of access to our most selective universities. You either teach a lot more students the rules of the game – or you change those rules. Some people, like Elliot Major, support sending trained advisers into every school, paid for by the government. Ward says that’s fine as a stopgap until universities get better at assessing potential rather than coaching and polish. “Let’s do that as long as we have to. But as universities, let’s make that time as short as possible,” she says.

 

The independent Office for Students, which regulates universities, has been running a consultation on changes to the application process; proposals include scrapping personal statements, and the system of applying for university before you get your results. But this has been paused during the pandemic.

 

All of the Sackville group ended up with the grades they needed, despite the flawed A-level algorithm. Isabelle is in various WhatsApp groups with other students who held offers from Oxford, which lit up with emotional messages when people lost their places on results day. “Some people missed their grades by one, and others were getting Cs and Ds,” she says. Some got their places back, after the government U-turn, or on appeal. Those who didn’t left the group chats.

 

Of course, none of us had any idea how strange and disrupted their university experience would turn out be. Ayo is beginning his Stanford degree remotely, and Eren says he has “accepted it’s going be different”. One of the students I spoke to recently isn’t too upset about the cancellation of freshers’ week (“I’m sure we will have plenty of fun on the sly”), but says it is “demoralising to have worked so hard and be paying so much for this ‘world-class education’ via Zoom”. She is resigned to a compromised first year, but hopes it will improve afterwards.

 

The students applying for British university next year have to submit their applications by 15 October if they are applying to study medicine, veterinary science, dentistry, or want to go to Oxford or Cambridge. Many have missed out on a huge chunk of lessons, particularly at state schools. There are well-founded fears that students at private schools and those with private tutors will have an even greater advantage this year. A study by UCL’s Institute of Education found that while 31% of private schools provided four or more live online lessons per day during lockdown, that was the case for only 6% of state schools.

 

Eren says he now wonders about all the other state schools that don’t send many or any students to Oxbridge. A couple of times he told me about his old school in Croydon, an underperforming comprehensive. His old school mates have struggled to get the places they wanted. “If you go to a school that hasn’t given you all the opportunities that you can have, it’s going to be way harder for you,” he says. “I think there’s a loss of talent and intelligence. It’s just a waste of people.”

 

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