In June, the University of Oxford published its Annual Admissions Statistics Report, an extensive document detailing the domicile, nation and region, disadvantage, school type, gender, ethnicity, and disability of most undergraduate applicants from 2021 to 2025. It found, interestingly, that the proportion of state-educated, UK-domiciled undergraduates admitted between 2021 and 2025 decreased from 68.2% to 66.5%. This is perhaps cause for concern for many outreach departments across the University, but I propose that there is an even broader issue: the way we define ‘state school’.
The Admissions Report splits the English education system into two wide categories of ‘state’ and ‘independent’. These categories broadly align with the simple question: did you pay to go to school or not? It is clear to me that the distinction in the report is intended to answer said question, and in that sense it does fulfil its purpose. In reality, however, England’s education system is far more complex, encompassing faith schools, free schools (state-funded but not run by the local authority), and academies. But when it comes to university admissions, the corresponding distinction in secondary education is that of state comprehensive, grammar, and private schools. Both the definition and importance of the three owe much to their shared history.
The system we see today stems from the Tripartite System, a product of the 1944 Education Act. Those who passed an exam akin to the 11+ were able to attend a prestigious grammar school, while those who failed had to choose between a secondary modern or a technical school. While at first praised for creating opportunities for the working class, who previously had to pay for their education, the Tripartite System soon became controversial, owing to the admissions test which often barred the working class from entry to grammar schools. Private and public schools, in which education cost a hefty fee, were still options for the wealthy.
The Tripartite System was replaced in the 1960s and 1970s by comprehensive schools. These schools did not select students based on income or academic merit, and instead admitted students in the local catchment area. As with most aspects of English society, the tides turned yet again in the 1980s, with Margaret Thatcher’s 1980 Education Act. ‘Marketisation’ of the education system meant that parents had greater choice in which school their child went to, and we still live with this system today. Comprehensive and private schools are still actively established across the country, but grammar schools have been abolished – it is no longer legal to set one up, but those of the past often continue with the grammar school name.
The historic divide between the secondary modern (roughly akin to the modern comprehensive) and the grammar school endures in the present day. There is a lot to praise the grammar school system for, such as the high standards of education that do not come with a price tag. Nevertheless, several material factors affect a child’s access to grammar schools. While in theory any child can take the 11+ exam, this may be an impractical burden for those not living near a grammar school, and like any exam, those who can afford private tuition are placed in a better position than those who cannot. According to the UCL Institute of Education, children from higher socio-economic backgrounds are far more likely to attend a grammar school than a child from a lower socio-economic background.
Once at school, social factors begin to shape each child’s future. Simply being in a classroom with high-achieving peers is a significant motivator, and primes students for study at a top university. While each person has a different view of their own time at school, I can say for myself that going to a comprehensive school did make me feel inferior, especially in terms of the facilities and resources offered at grammar and private schools. Why did fortune mean that I couldn’t access such resources? Growing up in that environment, I had never met someone who went to a grammar or private school until attending Oxford, and I admittedly thought very badly of those who did: being out of touch, posh, and entitled were stereotypes I fully believed in. But with these stereotypes also came the feeling that these people were better than me, as beneficiaries of fortune’s natural favour.
These factors translate into university admissions statistics. A report by the Sutton Trust found that of the top 100 schools with the highest Oxford admission rates, 78 were independent, 21 were grammar, and only 1 was comprehensive. There are only 163 grammar schools in England, but talking to students at Oxford may lead you to think that they constitute a far higher proportion of the country’s 6,000 secondary schools. However, there’s simply no way of discerning just how many of Oxford’s state-educated students went to grammar schools, because this information is not reflected in the data.
More importantly, without a more detailed impression of school type, it is much more difficult for departments and colleges to gauge the success of outreach and access initiatives. The 66.5% of Oxford students who attended a state school may actually be a combination of 90% grammar and 10% comprehensive, but we do not have access to this information, leaving us unable to determine if an initiative is actually working. Other measures do exist, including Free School Meals eligibility and Index of Multiple Deprivation, but if the aim is to increase the general number of applicants from state comprehensives, these alternative measures do not map neatly – roughly 90% of pupils in the UK attend a state comprehensive, while around 26% are eligible for Free School Meals. It is important that outreach be extended to both groups, and they often do overlap, but the University’s current state-school measure is unhelpful in this context.
I want to emphasise that this problem is not unique to Oxford. The University of Bristol, for example, uses the same broad categorisation. However, the University of Cambridge does distinguish between types of state school in their own statistics. If anything, my aim is simply to open up the discussion about education. Anecdotally, I’ve had peers at Oxford try to relate to me through our shared state education, but it falls flat for me when it becomes clear that this state school was in fact a grammar school.
For me, at least, while there can certainly be students at grammar schools who experience material hardship, these institutions are not the same at all. Grammar schools can be beneficial to a child’s education, and some are among the top-performing schools in the country, but it is a disservice to the lived experience of state comprehensive students to bind us together in admissions statistics.
In response, the University of Oxford told Cherwell: “Oxford’s access efforts focus on measures of disadvantage, for which school type is a poor proxy. The University uses a range of contextual information such as individual level indicators of disadvantage, postcode indicators of disadvantage, and school performance during the undergraduate admissions process.
This includes: additional Widening Participation (WP) information, information about an applicant’s school, information about an applicant’s neighbourhood, any experience in the care system, eligibility for Free School Meals (FSM) since age 11.”
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