The small set of offices next to a primary school in an unremarkable part of south London is a long way from the ancient honeyed architecture of Oxford. And, while I’m interviewing Donna Sinclair, CEO and founder of charity Options4Change, it occasionally feels like I’m being introduced to a front line I didn’t even know existed. Located in Lambeth – one of the most deprived districts in the country – this is the real world.

Set up in 2005 in response to “a lack of easy access to young people’s services”, Options4Change supports young people to achieve academic excellence. But children and their problems do not come in neat, easy packages. That means dealing with what Sinclair calls the “whole package”: creating aspirations for the future, dealing with children as well as their parents, education and gangs. It’s a two-pronged attack, focused on both encouraging aspirations and academic attainment, while trying to catch and support the children and parents who “just get left” by social services and the education system. It’s also about countering the negative approaches to young people’s welfare, instead trying to help young people make “lasting life achievements”. Sinclair calls the organisation “small, but influential”. According to conservative estimates by the charity, they contributed over £120,000 to Lambeth last year alone.

Throughout the interview Sinclair talks about the dysfunctional nature of what should be society’s last safety net.  She tells me about a 12 year old boy she knows. He witnessed a street shooting and a violent car incident. When his parents broke up, and the child developed depression, the GP called it a problem for the school to deal with. The school suggested the boy move to another school where he might be happier. There was no engagement from either party to address the problem. “But where is that frustration and anger going to go later?”, Sinclair asks.  

She tells me about children she knows personally who were ridiculed by their teachers for just saying they wanted to apply to university. A boy whose teachers colluded to keep him back a year doing nothing but reading a book each class. Why? Because he wrote to the headteacher complaining about his head of year.  It seems less surprising, then, that nationally only 40% of African-Caribbean children achieved five good GCSEs last year. Young black children are the second-worst performing ethnic group in schools.

And where do universities like Oxford figure in this system? Deprivation correlates with low academic achievement, especially with low entrance rates to top universities. What’s it like trying to get to Oxford from a Lambeth council estate? According to Sinclair, “You’ve got to be the absolute best. No-one wants to mould you, no-one believes that you can make it”. She says she knows many black boys who have talent and capability, but “no-one want to give them a chance to prove themselves”. Going to Oxbridge is a dream that’s so far beyond reality, it’s barely worth considering. “Who goes to Oxford? The echelon of society, and not just British society, any society. Not your local boy from down the road.”  Significantly, Sinclair tells me “it’s difficult to sell Oxford, because black kids don’t think it’s possible”.  

According to Sinclair, the cuts and the increase in university fees will simply exacerbate the problem. She tells me how she met Nick Clegg, who told her, “But you won’t have to pay a penny till you’re earning.” Her response is scathing. “It’s a debt!” To families earning minimum wage, the thought of paying £9,000 a year just for tuition is enough to put you off applying. As Sinclair puts it: “Everyone keeps saying we need to tighten our belts. But you can’t tighten your belts on lives.” Figures released on Monday show a fall of 9.9% in university applications in England – compared to a drop of only 1.5% in Scotland, where fees are not changing.

Sinclair is quick to stress she doesn’t think students should have everything done for them, “It should be no more difficult, by any measure, for any young person from any background”. Asked whether the university system is fair for young black people, her answer is direct: “No, it’s not fair. They’re there – if you look at the figures, they’re there. But they can only get into the ones it’s easy to get into.” When her son graduated from UCL two years ago, he was one of only two black people out of 200 students receiving degrees that afternoon. And it’s not just at university level: according to figures cited in a Cherwell article last year, out of 36,000 students in the UK getting AAA or better at A-level, only 452 were black. Sinclair tells me there are not enough school places for children in Lambeth. “There are lots of kids being temporarily educated at home…they’re not in our schools.” It’s a shocking revelation. As Sinclair exclaims, “They’re missing out on their most fundamental years!”

So what is the remedy? According to Sinclair it lies in grassroots and in Options4Change’s “people-centred approach”: the charity takes children to the House of Commons to meet MPs who themselves came from deprived areas, and Sinclair encourages children as young as six to start looking at career paths they hadn’t considered. “I get them researching astronauts!” she says. And what should the university do? “They should get out here, and start talking to charities like Options4Change.” I asked if she had heard anything from Jesus College, which is assigned Lambeth by the university’s regional outreach programme. Nothing, despite the charity’s links with Lambeth council and three of the London universities. When I mentioned the university’s Young Ambassadors program, the reaction was instantaneous. “But where are these students coming from? How are they meant to relate to the problems and obstacles kids from Lambeth have to overcome?” She was, however, highly supportive of the idea of charities like Teach First encouraging graduates of top universities to go into teaching – especially in difficult areas.

I came into the interview looking for neat, easy answers: grassroots initiatives, more funding for schools, the Big Society or that the big universities are simply not trying. But the picture that emerged was bigger than that. The theme that kept coming up is social architecture: the system set up in such a way that children in Lambeth have less support, fewer opportunities, and less access to education than their counterparts in more affluent areas. What I saw being laid out in front of me was a state and a society ignoring the needs and aspirations of young people in its deprived communities. And it’s more than a question of race. Sinclair points out it’s about culture, lifestyle, parenting, as well as the support systems the state is meant to provide.

Oxbridge, being the most selective educational aspect of that society, is a barometer for what is going on elsewhere.  Although the university must take some of the blame, the fact that a mere 32 black students were admitted this year is not just a comment on Oxford. The deeper issue at stake is that, as Sinclair put it, “Black kids aren’t even getting to the door.”

I don’t really care about whether or not the Black Cygnets’ predilection for chasing girls dressed as animals was harmless fun or degrading barbarity, but one thing about it does actually irritate me. Colleges are so paranoid about tabloids getting their hands on evidence that Oxford students not only drink, but even, just occasionally, have a tasteless sense of humour, that they are willing to dean, suspend and actually fine students guilty of little more than making themselves into objects of general ridicule.

I’m not endorsing whatever was done that was so terribly offensive, of course. But you have to wonder who colleges are actually representing when they punish students for moral laxity, now that forging undergraduates into sober, Godly little scholars is no longer the central goal of tertiary education. Colleges are small enough that genuinely nasty or offensive behaviour is hard to get away with. Sanctions do little more than force an air of musty Victorian outrage onto the issue.

But what really grates is the way Oxford is singled by the tabloids as if our drunken antics were any more bizarre, offensive and amusing than what goes on at other universities or even, dare I say it, among adults. I’m quite sure that the most offensive, vomit-slicked mess ever to stumble out of a crewdate pales in comparison to a Friday night pretty much anywhere else in the country. Oxford is, after all, a place where ‘Oh god, I’ve done no work’ means that one has been spending only daylight hours in the library. And yet, the simple fact that this university was founded in twelve hundred and something somehow means that a student passed out in black tie is worth printing.

Colleges should stop panicking so much about what gets printed. People love a story about invariably posh Oxford students staggering about bloated with port. But Oxford’s reputation was never built on its morals, and isn’t going to suffer because someone got photographed dressed up as a pig in drag or throwing up off a tower. If people want to laugh, let them have their fun, and us ours.

Little more than ten years ago, “media” meant the future. People who studied it would be les grands savants of the 21st century. The industry conjured up images of fast technology, fast cars and fast money. Then the mid-decade recession hit and the world of media was brought crashing back down to reality.

In Spain, where, despite a high rate of university graduates, youth unemployment stands at nearly 40%, newspapers are awash with pictures of glum Spaniards, their Latin passion replaced by economic despair, perplexed as to why they can’t find a job. When one reads the adjoining captions however, the reason becomes immediately apparent. They are almost always arts graduates. After all, who ever heard of an unemployed doctor or biochemist?

In the West, many dismissed the importance of enrolling in science courses. Instead, we would take pretty pictures and write fashion blogs. The aspirations of immigrant mothers for their children to be doctors, long the butt of jokes, are founded on perfectly legitimate grounds. Degrees in the sciences lead to employment, the development of new ideas, improvements in living standards, and put food on the table.

That’s not to say degrees in the arts are any less challenging or worthwhile, but there are only so many art historians a society can realistically support. Many philosophers of the 20th century – Marx, Freud and Russel to name but a few – were scientifically educated. It was arguably their expertise in science that allowed them to develop new social theories and political viewpoints. Germany, one of the few Western powers to have seen its manufacturing sector expand since 2005, is renowned for its large number of science graduates. German culture still punches above its weight in the arts, having created some of the most prominent writers, artists and philosophers of the modern age.

With the introduction of the £1 million Queen Elizabeth prize for engineering, the government has recognised the need for more science graduates, and is clearly keen to avoid the errors of past governments who siphoned thousands of state school children into “soft subjects” in a bid to artificially inflate grades. The introduction of engineering scholarships available to children from disadvantaged backgrounds should also aid social mobility, given the top science courses are so often dominated by students from the independent sector.

In today’s world, where China and India’s highly competitive education systems churn out millions of highly qualified, but often artistically numb graduates, our ability to compete undoubtedly lies in being both scientists and artists, however hard that may be.

What happened in Darfur?

What happened in Darfur was symptomatic of all the wider problems in Sudan. Sudan has suffered many regional revolutions over the past few decades as a result of bad central governance from Khartoum. Darfur was just one of those rebellions. Darfur, in the West, was a relatively wealthy part of Sudan but saw its wealth extracted by Khartoum through taxation and yet received nothing in exchange. Over the same period the region suffered a series of escalating terrible droughts which reduced the amount of land available for pasture. This put the Fur and other black African tribes in direct conflict with the nomadic Arab tribes favoured by Khartoum. Traditional reconciliation mechanisms broke down in the 1980s and 1990s when the Arab tribes were armed by the government in Khartoum and so felt less need to bargain.  After years of pent up anger, conflict broke out in 2003.

Was Colin Powell right to call it a genocide?

I don’t think so. In fact, the UN issued a report in 2004 which decided it wasn’t genocide either. I would call it a counter-insurgency exercise which got terribly out of control. Women and children were systematically killed much like in a genocide, but the government’s aim was to supress the rebels rather than eliminate entire ethnic groups. It was a brutal and nasty Maoist strategy of trying to drain the water to kill the fish.

How did the conflict end?

It didn’t! The conflict is on-going. There have been endless rounds of peace conferences, but people continue to get killed. The rate of displacement and killing is certainly less than in 2005, but the basic causes of the conflict have not been addressed and neither has either side been able to prevail militarily. It is a low level military stalemate.

Why did it receive so much attention from western celebrities?

There are three main reasons for this. Firstly, after it was labelled a genocide by Colin Powell, many important constituencies rallied around the Darfur cause. The Jewish element was also important, as prominent Jews reacted very strongly to this. Secondly, the crisis happened at a time when humanitarian interventionism was enjoying a renaissance. Tony Blair gave a famous speech in Chicago in 1999 and claimed the West has a moral duty to intervene when awful regimes commit mass atrocities. Particularly in America, there was a strong sense the USA had screwed up over Rwanda and Yugoslavia and that the West should not be caught napping again. The timing was important too as it was almost exactly the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. Thirdly, for a lot of the celebrities, it seemed like a cut and dry issue: a nasty Muslim regime killing innocent civilians in Africa. For them, it was obvious what should be done.  I would say they were seriously wrong in seeing it in such black and white terms.

In 2010, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan for genocide committed in Darfur. Why has he still not been brought to trial?

Firstly, we must remember that the ICC has no enforcement mechanism at all and is solely depended on the actions of its member countries. Sudan is not a subscribing member of the ICC.  So for President Bashir avoiding capture is really not that hard, he just stays at home and only visits countries that are not subscribing members of the ICC.

The bigger answer here is that a lot of African and Middle Eastern governments view the ICC as an agency of Western repression and Western white superiority against Africans and Arabs. The West is considered hypocritical to set up a court to enforce justice on their terms when they are the same nasty colonial people who plundered their lands only one or two generations ago.