• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Top Universities Taking More Pupils From State Schools

Posted on: Monday, 19 September 2005, 18:00 CDT

TOP universities are admitting thousands more state school students at the expense of privately educated pupils.

Government pressure on universities to take more undergraduates from comprehensives is beginning to have an effect, an Evening Standard survey shows.

Many parents of children at private schools will be concerned at the trend, which has been seen at prestigious institutions such as Oxford, Cambridge and Bristol.

Figures to be published on Thursday for the intake of every UK university in 2003-4 will show that most of the top universities took more students from state schools last year.

Higher education chiefs have promised to attract more stateeducated applicants in return for permission to charge Pounds 3,000 in top-up fees from next year.

About 90 per cent of British children are educated by the state and top universities still fail to admit anywhere near the proportion of state school students demanded by government targets. But pressure from ministers to "widen participation" in return for more cash is now being reflected in admissions figures.

Of the top universities we spoke to, Oxford's state school intake rose this year to stand at 52.7 per cent as against 51.7 per cent in 2003-4.

Birmingham's latest figures saw state intake go up from 78.9 per cent in 2002-3 to 80 per cent in 2003-4.

The uptake of comprehensive students at Bristol - target of a boycott two years ago by private schools concerned it was biased towards state applicants - rose from 63.8 per cent in 2002-3 to 65.2 per cent in 2003-4.

Warwick, another of the top 19 universities, admitted its 77.8 per cent in 2002-3 dropped to 76.5 per cent last year.

But state recruitment at Warwick is still higher than it was four years ago when former education secretary Estelle Morris launched a campaign to break the middleclass " stranglehold" on university places.

The trend will spark a new row over attempts to dictate the social makeup of universities, many of which were furious last year when the Government increased their state school recruitment targets.

Oxford's went from 69 per cent to 77.2 per cent, while Cambridge was told it should be recruiting 76.8 per cent of its intake from state schools, up from 68 per cent.

Oxford chancellor Lord Patten warned top universities would have to go private and charge American Ivy League-style fees to replace taxpayers' grants if ministers continued to blackmail them into "spurious" social engineering.

Earlier this month, higher education minister Bill Rammell ordered universities to keep back a quota of places until after the A-level results were published for state pupils who do better than expected.

THE Government is to press ahead with a test intended to help pupils from comprehensive schools get into top universities. The Department for Education and Skills is funding a five-year trial of the American Scholastic Aptitude Test, starting in November next year.

Source: Evening Standard; London (UK)

More News in this Category