Tag Archives: oxford university

For-profit schools: some evidence of why I’m far from convinced

student_ipad_school - 175Labour’s shadow education secretary, Tristram Hunt, this week called on Michael Gove to rule out profit-making schools, arguing “Beyond 2015, whether it admits it or not, the Conservative Party intends to introduce the profit motive into English education”.

The Tories have sidestepped the issue and instead invited Labour to turn its fire on the Lib Dems: they claim that Nick Clegg’s advisers Julian Astle and Richard Reeves were behind-the-scenes cheerleaders for profit-making schools. The mercurial Dominic Cummings, Gove’s former special adviser, has made the same allegation. This may very …

Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged , , , , , , , and | 26 Comments

Oxbridge admissions: what the numbers actually say

It’s almost become a political cliché to quote the (apparently) (appallingly) (allegedly) low number of black students being accepted to Oxford and Cambridge Universities. But for all the widespread quoting of those numbers, there is very little done usually to put the numbers in context.

So here’s a simple chart that compares the actual admission figures for black students with what they would be if if the proportion of acceptances who are black was the same as the proportion of people who take GCSEs who are black or if it was the same as the proportion of people who get three As at A-level and are black:

Posted in News | Also tagged and | 29 Comments
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