What is this Oxbridge alumni connect? :@P

If I had got the grades at A Level I wouldn’t have waited until my teachers suggested Oxbridge I would have been there before they’d even asked!!

I’d back Simon up, purely anecdotally. For a start, bright state school pupils are disadvantaged by the anti-Oxbridge bias of some teachers. A recent Sutton Trust report suggested that something like a staggering 20% of teachers would NEVER recommend Oxbridge to their bright pupils. That’s an outrageous curtailment of people’s options.

Also anecdotally, a friend who used to be an admissions tutor at a Cambridge college showed me a database of schools he used when considering applications. It showed averages for GCSE/A-level results for every school, and he was able to make a fairer contextual judgement about people’s grades or predicted grades based on the school they went to – not very systematic but a slight improvement, and I think he said the whole university used that system. It’s rare, but EE offers do exist as a mechanism for getting underachieving bright pupils in. Checking the figures on those offers and who they get made to might be worth doing, actually…

“plenty of kids from state schools do get the grades, but fail to apply in the numbers that they should.”

Do you have any figures to back your claims up? As Tim has said it’s been proven that working-class kids from state schools underachieve – I was told by one of my A Level teachers – by as much as one or two grades below their ability. This is due to many factors, poverty being the most obvious one, but also the fact, which I have recently blogged about, that the presence of middle-class kids in a school improves working-class achievement. But they are just not integrated enough due to all this selection we have. There is also an issue of confidence in ability here, an issue which I have also blogged on.

I have only been educated alongside a very bright student once and the class really did benefit from it. He was at our FE college for reasons I could never quite work out, but was a straight A student. His questions used to startle the tutor so much she’d spend 15 minutes of the class just talking to him and discussing his ideas, but the rest of the class benefitted hugely from that. What we had was probably a university level discussion around us, which surely increased our confidence with ideas. Just a thought at the end there!

But it would mean that schools no longer had a “league table” rationale for cherry picking middle class kids.

Under the pupil premium kids from these backgrounds would (finally!) get the grades to end up as my students in decent numbers. I hope that they then would.

But today the reason so many people at Oxbridge/LSE etc are from private schools (or selective state schools) is that so many of the students getting 3As+ come from those schools. This is one of those sad but true facts. Of course, at the margin, we want more of those who come from non-trad backgrounds and get high grades to go to top univs, but the big reason that there are so few people from such backgrounds at these univs is not lack of ambition, or discrimination, it is lack of grades. That is why a pupil premium is so important.

On your point 1, though. Surely higher funding might not be enough to simply stop schools cheery-picking middle class kids. To a certain extent, it is the middle classes cherry picking the best schools by paying extra to live in the catchment area. I am sure that it would be a partial answer to the problem, but not quite close to a solution.

Some clarifications in answer to questions:
1) A pupil premium gives more money to schools if the pupil concerns meets certain criteria. An obvious one would be to pay £x more to the school than the usual allocation for each “free school meals” kid. This should have two effects. First, it makes these kids more attractive to schools, so that they are less likely to try to cherry-pick easy-to-teach kids from supportive backgrounds. This means that places in “good schools” will be spread around more evenly. Second, it gives the school more money to use to teach these kids.
2) Whilst it would be possible for the state to prescribe what the school could do with the money, I assume that the LibDems would leave it up to the School. If we were talking about doubling, trebling, or multiplying funding by an even higher multiple, then realistically much of the money would be spent on staff. I assume that this would include improving the quantity of staff (smaller class sizes, or much great use of small group or individual teaching), and the quality of staff (these schools would be able to offer higher salary rates, thus attracting better staff)
3) We have a sort of pupil premium in the UK already, in that shire counties (which have fewest kids from low attainment backgrounds) have the lowest levels of funding. In addition, a handful of kids in care are sent to private boarding schools (although some of the costs are offset by reduced costs of care home places). It is more explicit in the Netherlands, where I understand the ratio is 3:1 for the kid who gets the most, to the kid who gets the least. I am told that it is effective, but I am not sure what proportion of the educational gap is closed. I understand that CentreForum are thinking of doing some work in this area, and I think it would be brilliant if they did.
4) The cost-benefit-analysis is for the govt as a whole. It simply looks at whether the costs are covered by the increases in wages later in life. It is not a CBA for the school. At (say) 3:1 funding levels I think that there would be real interest in taking in these kids at school level.
5) At the moment encouraging kids from poor backgrounds to apply to Oxford and LSE is unlikely to be very effective, as very few kids from such backgrounds get the grades to get in, and succeed on arrival. Sad but true.
I hope that this is useful: if people have any other points that they want answering, ask away, either via the list or to

Question for you though, Tim. Are the calculations based on increased monetary impact only, or also considering potential benefits from good schools being more attracted to pupils who receive the premium?

Whilst it’s a bit unclear with our non-selection policy whether this would even be possible, a big driver of change from the original (pre-”free schools”) proposal was the increased attractiveness of socially deprived children to previously solid middle class schools.

Your cost-benefit analysis suggests that overall it wouldn’t make sense for schools to do this (i.e. the increased cash wouldn’t cover the increased expense), but in practice many schools might have specific uses for increased funding and an ability to deal with socially deprived children at a lower than average marginal cost (e.g. already existing specialist services, currently under-utilised).

There is a problem of social segregation by private vs. state schools, but we can’t exactly use state power to ban people educating themselves not through the state, whether it is home schooling or buying books at Waterstones. What we can do is let different schools compete, raising up poverty, rather than lowering down wealth, and aim money, resources and other levers that we have access to to spread opportunity to the worst off. For example, the Observer today has a great article about the over 1 million adults who can’t read and write. By tackling their problems, we can really help their kids too. This should be something that would really help the worst off and something that liberals should be leading the charge on. This is as much about extra literacy classes, Surestart, Skills for Life and government programmes as just extra money.

It’s surely much more useful to think of it as a scale, as opposed to an either/or choice of “poverty of ambition or not”, but it does make Tim’s basic question – how much is enough? – even more complex because literally every child would require a slightly different subsidy to bring them to some agreed standard. How could you band pupils fairly and decide how much subsidy certain bands should get? Where would you draw the line in terms of fine detail assessment?

“The extra funding is supposed to be required to teach such pupils, so how is the school supposed to gain a net benefit?”

Is a slightly cynical case of subjective economics in play? Just as individuals are hopelessly optimistic about, eg, future earnings (certainly I am ) perhaps the idea is that schools get optimistic about how much of that extra funding will really be required to take on the extra teaching costs. There’s also a less cynical argument at work to do with economies of scale – say taking on ten SEN pupils requires the same number of extra teachers as eight but all SEN pupils bring the same amount of funding, the school would be sensible to take on the ten, which is a good outcome.

Great points! I’m less interested in the economics but that debate must carry on too…

We have, or used to have, a perfectly good word for this difference that is both more inclusive and less patronising: “docility” (www.thefreedictionary.com/docile). We don’t use the word with quite its original meaning any more, but it simply means that students will differ in their readiness and willingness to learn and be taught. And there can be many reasons for this, including – yes – innate intelligence, but also all the societal factors that posters have already mentioned. I also believe that docility can vary for different subjects, for different teaching methods, and over time. (With respect to the latter, I mean that people often seem to become more docile with age; this was why attempting to put people in either the Morlock or Eloi box at age 11 was so profoundly wrong.)

If I understand it correctly, the supposition behind the pupil premium is that less docile students are costlier to educate. I think that this is likely to be true in the majority of cases. Although I want to make three observations.

First, if this is true then I’m puzzled by the argument we sometimes hear, to the effect that the pupil premium will incentivise schools to admit more less-docile pupils, because of the extra funding they bring. The extra funding is supposed to be required to teach such pupils, so how is the school supposed to gain a net benefit? (Incidentally, I think one of the better arguments in favour of comprehensive schools – and non-selective education generally – is that the per-pupil funding of the docile students cross-subsidises the less-docile students.)

Second, it’s arguable that gifted (hyper-docile, if you like) students are also more costly to teach, and therefore also deserve a premium. Now, I confess I’m sceptical about how many genuinely gifted students there are; I suspect many are merely precocious. But the argument still applies.

Finally, as other posters have hinted, because docility can have so many, overlapping causes, we need to be careful to ensure that extra funding is really the right answer in each case. As I mentioned above, a change of teaching methods may be enough.