Tag Archives: oxbridge

Opinion: fix our school system and stop uni-bashing

As a former constituent and activist in Bermondsey and Old Southwark I greatly enjoyed campaigning on behalf of Simon Hughes and have a lot of respect for his approach to policy and the hard work he puts in, especially meeting face to face with local voters and community groups. I was shocked, however, to read quotes from Simon on the front page of Saturday’s Guardian calling on universities to ‘cut intake’ from independent schools in order to match nationally ‘representative’ proportions: 7.2% was his quoted figure for the proportion of students we ought to aim at coming from an …

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Opinion: In pursuit of excellence

Earlier this month David Lammy MP highlighted the problem of the low number of black students admitted to Oxford and Cambridge Universities and called it the ‘Oxbridge Whitewash’. He wrote in the Guardian (6 Dec):

“Just one British black Caribbean student was admitted to Oxford last year. That is not a misprint: one student. Merton College, Oxford, has not admitted a single black student for five years. At Robinson College, Cambridge, a white applicant is four times more likely to be successful than a black applicant. Last year, 292 black students achieved three A grades at A-level and 475 black

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , and | 15 Comments
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Recent Comments

  • Chris Webb
    1 State procurement teams being outwitted / outhought by sector experts (paid more and with greater specialist knowledge) is not exclusive to MoD - i only have ...
  • cim
    @David Allen Absolutely agreed. Incremental changes, fully-costed policies, a focus on "competence" as opposed to "ideology". It's not necessarily a bad offe...
  • Alex Macfie
    "stopping the tech companies harming their users" which should mean regulating the tech companies not the users, i.e. forcing the companies to change their busi...
  • Edward
    A PhD is really the most meaningless qualification that there is, you really can't judge the worth of a PhD without reading the thesis. For some subjects you h...
  • Chris Cory
    While I agree with every word, I am at the same time, more than a little discombobulated. If we believe all this fine "power to the people" stuff, then isn't...