18 year old electrician paying the tuition fees of 'toffs'

[turbobloke]

Derek Smith said:

turbobloke said:

He and the others will need to work on a decent slice of state school teacherdom as well. That's the message they put out.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/educat...

Research by the Sutton Trust (above) sounded the alarm several years ago and the really blatant stuff has made it into the dailies. The pace of change in terms of awareness is slow. Sobering reading ahead from various sources...the headlines say a lot if reading time is short.

https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news...

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/state-school...

http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/comment/0032877-the-real-...

43% of teachers never advised students to apply for OxBridge. That’s a great headline figure, but that’s all it is.

Clearly, that's not all it is. Within the total - of teachers and their students - there will be numbers of very able students in each cohort being failed by their teachers' lack of awareness, lack of aspiration for their students, and (more than likely) a dose of inverted snobbery. Rinse and repeat year-on-year.

Take a long hard look at the last sentence in this extract from Ofsted as posted previously in the grammar schools thread.

Ofsted reporting on research into how too many non-selective secondary schools fail their most able students badly said:

These outcomes are unacceptable in an increasingly competitive world. If we are to succeed as an economy and society, we have to make more of our most able young people. We need them to become the political, commercial and professional leaders of tomorrow.

Too many non-selective schools are failing to nurture scholastic excellence. While the best of these schools provide excellent opportunities, many of our most able students receive mediocre provision. Put simply, they are not doing well enough because their secondary schools fail to challenge and support them sufficiently from the beginning.

It is a serious concern that many non-selective schools fail to imbue their most able students with the confidence and high ambition that characterise many students in the selective or independent sector. Why should the most able students in the non-selective sector not have the same belief that they, too, can reach the top?

Other universities are going to struggle to compete with the excellence already achieved at Oxbridge. The latest Times Higher ranking of global unis puts them in first and second place. Anyone interested enough can take a look at THE's methodology to see how this position arose.

We have the best two universities in the world, and we as a country need to make it as smooth a process as possible for the best students to gain admission. Clearly this has a qualifier, namely 'of those who want to apply' but therein lies the rub when any very able students anywhere at any time are being dissuaded from applying by their teachers for political or personal reasons (including ignorance) on the part of teachers not their students. Non-selective schools are notable for their underperformance in this regard, Ofsted has already demonstrated this unfortunate situation.

[anonymous-user]

Not one of my friends from Cambridge in the late 90's went to private school although I did. Most of them participated in the outreach program going back to their old schools to encourage applications. Every one who did, experienced resistance from some teachers not wanting to send kids to a 'posh', 'elitist' Uni. My wife's head teacher actually told her and her parents not to apply because she would never fit in and bked the teacher who took her and a few others on an open day in his own time. She got a 1st in Law and her school since closed. Have the political and social prejudices of enough public sector teachers changed much in the last 20 years?

[eccles]

fblm said:

Not one of my friends from Cambridge in the late 90's went to private school although I did. Most of them participated in the outreach program going back to their old schools to encourage applications. Every one who did, experienced resistance from some teachers not wanting to send kids to a 'posh', 'elitist' Uni. My wife's head teacher actually told her and her parents not to apply because she would never fit in and bked the teacher who took her and a few others on an open day in his own time. She got a 1st in Law and her school since closed. Have the political and social prejudices of enough public sector teachers changed much in the last 20 years?

My school was completely different.
I went to an ordinary comprehensive school on the rural outskirts of Swansea in the late 70's early 80's and our school positively encouraged the few pupils who got the right results to apply for Oxbridge.
My sister was one of them, and got a little help in applying, but ultimately she didn't get in.We had a nice family day out in Oxford while did some interviews or exams (I can't remember which)and then headed home. There wasn't a sense of reverence or awe about it, just the thought of trying to get in to a good uni.

[turbobloke]

fblm said:

She got a 1st in Law

Tit Hall by any chance? Usually worth a try, not prying just guessing!

[anonymous-user]

My ex and too many of my friends are from Tit Hall. Yeearrrrghhh!

[anonymous-user]

At my Suburban Sixth Form College in 1980 about 100 of us were dragooned into the main lecture theatre and told that we were doing the Oxbridge exams. No ifs, no buts. I briefly rebelled on the basis that Oxford was arsey, but that rebellion faded when I was taken on a day trip to sit in the sun dappled garden of what became my college talking to a striking twenty year old called Mary Anne Sieghart, then a finalist (I ended up in the same chambers as her dad, who was a very grand international lawyer with a long cigarette holder).

About 80 of the 100 got in to either Oxford or Cambridge. The sixth form college still sends 80 plus kids a year to Oxbridge.

[Derek Smith]

turbobloke said:

Derek Smith said:

turbobloke said:

He and the others will need to work on a decent slice of state school teacherdom as well. That's the message they put out.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/educat...

Research by the Sutton Trust (above) sounded the alarm several years ago and the really blatant stuff has made it into the dailies. The pace of change in terms of awareness is slow. Sobering reading ahead from various sources...the headlines say a lot if reading time is short.

https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news...

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/state-school...

http://www.tcs.cam.ac.uk/comment/0032877-the-real-...

43% of teachers never advised students to apply for OxBridge. That’s a great headline figure, but that’s all it is.

Clearly, that's not all it is.

You miss my point and by some distance. I thought it was clear enough, but there you go.

Headlines mean nothing in themselves. As I said, the function of a headline is to grab attention and that's what this one did, quite obviously it did for you at least. Reading one of the articles you linked to, the circumstances are made clearer. 60% of the 43%, that's over half, did so because they did not favour any particular university. It is a shame this statistic was not quoted in the other articles. I can't think why it should have been missed.

You might feel that they should encourage students to a particular university. I disagree. Teachers should be there to help and support the students in coming to their decisions. I consider it a good message to put out that they are able to make their own choices.

You quote another report. That's got little to do with my post which merely pointed out that the headline was misleading.

I strongly disagree with your suggestion that if one is short of time one should take the headline at face value. That's the way to ignorance. There's not much to grab the attention in a headline which reads: Students encouraged by teachers to take responsibility for their own decisions so that's probably why it wasn't used. There's no point. After all, who would get their information from headlines?

[Angrybiker]

What is your obsession, you lot, with Oxbridge and people going or not going? An Oxbridge degree does not guarantee an outstanding job by any means. I have known quite a lot of very senior people in a variety of industries over the course of my working life, those people having Oxbridge degrees is very much the exception rather than the rule. So what if it's for people who are both bright and work hard? Who cares if they're biased towards people with the resources to help their kids get there? There is more to life. If your perception of a fantastic career is selling your soul and entire life to the likes of Freshfields or McKinsey in the vain hope that you might one day be one of the very lucky few to make it to a decent whack, then fine, whatever floats your boat. But really, all these pages of discussion on the subject? Come on, people.

Going to a decent university on a course that actually teaches you how to think, analyse and present; vs. waste of time pieces of st - is a fair enough discussion. But the number of decent unis is a lot larger than just Oxbridge.

[anonymous-user]

Breadvan72 said:

The sixth form college still sends 80 plus kids a year to Oxbridge.

That's pretty amazing. How many in total in the year?

[liner33]

Angrybiker said:

What is your obsession, you lot, with Oxbridge and people going or not going? An Oxbridge degree does not guarantee an outstanding job by any means. I have known quite a lot of very senior people in a variety of industries over the course of my working life, those people having Oxbridge degrees is very much the exception rather than the rule. So what if it's for people who are both bright and work hard? Who cares if they're biased towards people with the resources to help their kids get there? There is more to life. If your perception of a fantastic career is selling your soul and entire life to the likes of Freshfields or McKinsey in the vain hope that you might one day be one of the very lucky few to make it to a decent whack, then fine, whatever floats your boat. But really, all these pages of discussion on the subject? Come on, people.

Going to a decent university on a course that actually teaches you how to think, analyse and present; vs. waste of time pieces of st - is a fair enough discussion. But the number of decent unis is a lot larger than just Oxbridge.

What is your obsession with sweeping generalisations? I'm sure than many people who couldnt get in might share your views

Oxford and Cambridge are top performing universities providing a first rate education, why would anyone NOT want to go to a good university when you pay the same for a good one as a bad one?

Of course there are lots in between but it seems perfectly sensible to me to choose the best universities you can if you meet the criteria and they offer the course you are interested in and they may or may not include Oxbridge, there is nothing wrong with aiming high in life and the data is there to support that Oxbridge graduates do earn more on average than non-Oxbridge

[anonymous-user]

Oxbridge is only an obsession with readers of the Telegraph and the heads and parents of London independent schools, but the wider point is that the country needs and has several elite universities, but that access to them is unduly limited to the professional middle classes, because of inequalities in schooling.

The British Ivy League is, I would say, Oxford, Cambridge, KCL, LSE, UCL, Queen Mary, Imperial, Brunel, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Queen's Belfast, Manchester, York, and maybe Leeds and Warwick. I am not so sure about Durham, Birmingham, and Bristol.

On social mobility, see :-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-42112436

[London424]

Breadvan72 said:

Oxbridge is only an obsession with readers of the Telegraph and the heads and parents of London independent schools, but the wider point is that the country needs and has several elite universities, but that access to them is unduly limited to the professional middle classes, because of inequalities in schooling.

The British Ivy League is, I would say, Oxford, Cambridge, KCL, LSE, UCL, Queen Mary, Imperial, Brunel, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Queen's Belfast, Manchester, York, and maybe Leeds and Warwick. I am not so sure about Durham, Birmingham, and Bristol.

On social mobility, see :-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-42112436

Aren't you missing Labour MPs and voters off your list of those obsessed?

[anonymous-user]

Silly comments by Lammy don't have much impact on voting . Oxbridge is not an issue that impinges on the minds of most voters of any persuasion, and most Labour voters probably don't fit the distorted stereotype beloved of NPE.

[turbobloke]

Breadvan72 said:

Silly comments by Lammy don't have much impact on voting . Oxbridge is not an issue that impinges on the minds of most voters of any persuasion, and most Labour voters probably don't fit the distorted stereotype beloved of NPE.

And as you pointed out earlier in the thread, most Oxbridge students don't fit the Lammy caricature of a floppy hatted aristo wearing pink corduroys with yellow ruffled shirt and a tasteless/unnecessary cravat.

[anonymous-user]

Social Mobility Board jacks it in -

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-42212270

[anonymous-user]

Durham sounds dire - aping the worst aspects of Oxbridge (which have mostly died out at the real Oxbridge), but without the academic excellence.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec...

[liner33]

Breadvan72 said:

I had a drink in the King's Arms in Oxford last night with the bloke who is currently in charge of my old college. He thinks that removing student fees would simply be a subsidy for the middle classes. He would retain the current system but stop calling it a loan and brand it as a graduate tax. He says that the fees are not deterring applicants from non middle class backgrounds, but that "I can't go to Oxbridge, it's full of weird posh people" is. Thus he and others spend time trying to combat the latter.

Biggest issue I can see at present with applying to Oxbridge is that pupils from state schools very much feel the cards are stacked against them, there is much more support for schools that usually produce Oxbridge graduates , the average state school can offer little in terms of support for potential applicants and when it comes to many private schools that support can cross a line as with the recent scandal at Eton. Some Uni applicants this year will have 5 or 6 A levels, most state schools wont support a student doing more than 4 max

I'm not a fan of calling it a graduate tax , its a loan, a loan that some students wont every pay and a loan that others will pay many times over, its also charged at 6.1%, so its a pretty expensive loan. Ultimately as it is, it wont work and students will have to pay more . Those with wealthy parents will just pay it off

But yet again the problem is what about the poorer students? Everyone gets a student loan for the fees but maintenance loans are based on household income

If you have less that £25000k per year coming into your house then you can apply for the full £8430 per year but above its on a sliding scale requiring parental support increasingly as household income rises, by a little over £62k you can only apply for less than £4k so middle class parents will simply cover that difference and likely most of the living costs , I know we will

Any family having an income of £25k per year would be horrified to think of their child finishing university with a £50k plus debt

I think they have built a system that benefits the Universities and penalises the poorer students.

[B'stard Child]

liner33 said:

I think they have built a system that benefits the Universities and penalises the poorer students.

Clever feckers to do that really........

Not like the Universities are paying their heads much more these days is it?

[turbobloke]

B'stard Child said:

liner33 said:

I think they have built a system that benefits the Universities and penalises the poorer students.

Clever feckers to do that really........

Not like the Universities are paying their heads much more these days is it?

Taking a Bath has a whole new meaning,

[Marlin45]

IroningMan said:

None of this seemed to be that much of an issue until the Rev A W Blair decided that all shall have degrees.

Yup!