Tag Archives: clare tyler

NewsHound

LibLink: Clare Tyler: Why the class gap is holding back state school students

By NewsHound | Sat 19th December 2015 - 11:55 am

Private schools educate 7% of pupils, but account for 42.5% of Oxford students. This statistic, according to Baroness Clare Tyler, puts the UK behind even Harvard, the most elite US university.

She wrote for the Huffington Post in the wake of a damning report on social mobility in the UK.

At Oxford, the percent of state school students hasn’t budged since 2002. And today, just 14.3% of Oxford’s students come from the bottom half of households by income. Whilst one in five children are on free school meals, this can be said of just one in a 100 Oxbridge graduates.

She argued that universities and government must do more to make sure that people’s circumstances of their birth don’t define their future.

Making our best universities more accessible is only one of the many steps we need to take to create a fairer and more socially mobile society. It’s not that our bright low-income students aren’t working hard–in fact, research shows that state school students in Russell Group universities with the same A level grades are 50% more likely to graduate with a first class degree compared to their independent school peers.

Continue reading »
Posted in LibLink | Also tagged , and | 13 Comments
Advert

Recent Comments

  • Peter Davies
    Compulsory voting would provide a big boost for those of us who appear at the top of the ballot paper....
  • Steve Trevethan
    Thank you for a most relevant article on the vulnerabilities of our alleged "Democracy"! Might ignorance, both passive and imposed/structural, be a signific...
  • Kevin Hawkins
    There has been a lot of discussion on Lib Dem Voice about our party’s performance in different parts of the country with a number of people commenting that we...
  • Ellyott
    My memory from the time of the introduction of the triple lock was in response to the reduction of the state pension's buying power in preceding years and its l...
  • Nonconformistradical
    I agree with Paul Barker at 16th Oct '26 - 3:41pm...