Though left and right alike declare that birth shouldn’t determine where you go to university, a fierce debate still rages about Oxbridge access. This time, complaints come from the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC), which represents private schools, in response to proposals from the Office for Students to increase the number of disadvantaged students studying at England’s elite universities by 6,500 each year from 2024-25.
To illustrate the absurdity of these claims, consider the current proportion of poorer students at universities such as Oxford, which counts 15 students from the UK’s wealthiest neighbourhoods for every one from the most disadvantaged. The HMC claims, somewhat hysterically, that the move will squeeze out middle-class students by discriminating against private schools, insisting that admissions should be focused on “truly suitable students” rather than “class”.
The private sector accounts for 7% of all schools, yet its graduates already enjoy a wildly disproportionate amount of airtime: they account for 65% of senior judges, 29% of MPs and 43% of top journalists. For the minority of working-class applicants who do make it to elite universities, the entrenched prejudices they face can be debilitating. I arrived at Oxford from a state school in Birmingham and spent years attempting to shake off my sense of socioeconomic difference.
We should interrogate what the HMC means by that sticky term “suitability”. The very notion of intelligence is confused with the hallmarks of a private education. The confidence of a privileged education often carries you further in a university admissions process than determination or rigour. Private schools furnish children with the rhetorical skills and professional veneer to ensure that questions of competence and ability never really matter. Given how successful the private sector has been in supplanting our understanding of intelligence with these qualities, making admissions processes fairer and more representative of society won’t just be about numbers: it will require a radical cultural shift.
At the root of the frustrations about Oxbridge access is the idea that people should have the freedom to buy their offspring access to the upper echelons of the professional society through sending them to private schools, without acknowledging the inequality and discrimination inherent in that aspiration. Among those angered by the news that fewer privileged students will be offered Oxbridge places in the future, I’m sure there will be many who consider themselves fair-minded and progressive.
But discussions of inequality, lack of diversity and underrepresentation are futile if they fail to acknowledge the one factor underscoring and exacerbating them all: class.
• Nathalie Olah is the author of Steal As Much As You Can
