“I saw figures the other day that showed that only one black person went to Oxford last year.” This was the claim made by David Cameron in a PM Direct event in North Yorkshire which sparked a media storm a few weeks ago. Oxford University rose up to defend itself, arguing that the Prime Minister had got his facts wrong and that he had misled the public. However, while most of the attention was focused on the PM’s gaffe and the amusing tussle which ensued between him and his alma mater, the serious point at the core of his confused statement was only picked up by a few.
The actual statistics are not so unfavourable but are still shocking. In 2009 the University’s intake for undergraduate study was 2,653 students. According to research carried out in December by David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, this number included only one student from a black Caribbean background and only forty students from any other black background. In the same year, eleven Oxford colleges did not make a single offer to a black student.
On viewing these statistics it is all too easy to dismiss Oxford as a racist or elitist institution and, typically, many have done so. But this does not tackle the heart of the problem: that lies in schools and in wider communities.
This is certainly the view of Dr. Tony Sewell, founder and director of Generating Genius, a charity which works with inner-city secondary school children from under-represented backgrounds and aims to get them into university. He believes it is important not to get bogged down in the race debate. “It is perhaps less an issue of race than it is of class”, he argues. At some of the country’s worst performing comprehensive schools, the same difficulties are faced by all pupils, regardless of race or ethnicity.
“In these schools, there tend to be very low expectations placed upon the children; it’s sad, but it’s like the teachers are trying to protect them from places like Oxford.” This self-sustaining and highly damaging attitude is what Sewell describes as ‘liberal strangulation’. Parents too, it seems, often have a detrimental influence: “Their parents have often had bad experiences with education themselves, and so they pass on this negative attitude.”
From his point of view, Sewell sees the problem as affecting children well before they come to fill out a UCAS application form. “University is simply too high up the tree. We need to look at the root causes of this inequality.” Dr Wendy Piatt from the Russell Group concurs with this evaluation – the issue, for her, is more about ‘under-achievement at school’.
New research carried out by the team on the BBC Radio 4 programme More or Less puts this argument into perspective. According to their research, 17% of white students who achieve three As at A-Level go on to gain a place at Oxbridge, compared to 14.5% of black students with the same grades. Oxford claims that this disparity is due to the fact that black students are more likely to apply for the most competitive courses – such as Maths, Economics and Management, and Medicine – and so have a reduced overall success rate.
While this may be a valid point, however, it is an irrelevant one. If Oxbridge did recruit the same proportion of black students with three As at A-Level as they do white students (17%), the number of black students would go up from 61 to 78 – not a small increase by any means. However, if Oxbridge changed nothing at all and the education system was able to increase the proportion of black school pupils gaining three As at A-Level and lift it to the same level as white pupils, then the number of black students entering Oxbridge would more than double to 130.
This, then, is the real point. The inequality does not begin at university level, but is far more widespread in the education system and the structure of society as a whole. While the country’s oldest universities may not be perfect (and they are certainly not when it comes to access), they are not the principal culprits as David Cameron and others would like to suggest they are.
The problem is far more complex than this and the issue is not about race so much as class. What the Prime Minister may not want to admit in public is that in today’s society many children’s futures are already decided for them well before they even dream of applying to university.
What is more worrying still, though, is that the PM is as yet unwilling to lay out his plans for encouraging the country’s top universities to widen access. With the tuition fees for universities like Oxford and Cambridge set to rise to £9000 it seems like a rare opportunity to set out some clear objectives and impose some strict rules regarding access. If this opportunity is missed, however, and if this chance is scuppered, the implications will be damaging to the entire country and we will end up regretting it for generations to come.
