Targets culture puts state schools at Oxbridge disadvantage
Extra efforts at bringing all students up to grade C level means brighter ones are not pushed, says Oxford admissions chief
A target-driven culture in state schools is putting potential Oxford University applicants at a disadvantage, with teachers focusing on lower achieving pupils to ensure their school is well placed in league tables.
The claim comes from Oxford University's head of undergraduate admissions, Mike Nicholson, who said that "extra effort" on raising the achievements of C grade and D grade students meant the "solid B" student was being missed.
Changes in the state education system and an emphasis on rankings and exam results meant it was sometimes harder for state school pupils to go on to meet Oxford University's admissions criteria, said Nicholson.
In an interview with BBC Radio 4, to be broadcast tonight, he said: "There is a target-driven culture.
"GCSE performance is one of the few indicators used to demonstrate school success. Schools wanting to ensure they are well-placed will make every effort to get as many students who are going to get C grades to get C grades. Any student who might get a D grade, they'll put some extra effort into trying to get those students up to a C grade.
"Maybe there are students who are being missed, who have got a solid B potential and aren't in any danger of dropping below that C grade that's going to get the school an extra percentage point on their performance figures. That's the group of students who could be being disadvantaged."
Private school pupils take up more than a quarter of places at the country's top universities including almost half of all places at Oxford despite representing just 7% of pupils in England. Earlier this month the Liberal Democrat deputy leader Simon Hughes, who is also the government's adviser on access to higher education, told the Guardian that universities were failing "miserably" to reflect society.
Oxford has previously said its intake is representative of! student s who have the academic potential to succeed at Oxford.
Privately educated children have a far better chance of getting into the most selective universities because their performance at GCSE and A-level outstrips that of state pupils. Figures released last summer, from the Independent Schools Council, showed that almost two-thirds of GCSE entries from private schools were either awarded A or A*. Around 33% of students achieving AAA at A-Level are from the private sector.
Nicholson also expressed concern at the way A-Levels were taught in some state schools, saying the syllabus had changed "dramatically" through attempts to diversify it and that there were a lot of students who were being taught how to pass exams.
"What we are not encouraging students to do is to learn stuff and regurgitate it. We're encouraging them to think and engage with the material. What signifies good, excellent teaching is the teacher who is prepared to encourage students to think beyond the syllabus. It is often down to individual teachers and the opportunities they have, with whatever other responsibilities they've got, to go that bit further."
In schools where only one or two applied to Oxford, there was not a "huge push to do much" with those students. Where schools did not have a history of sending pupils to Oxford, there was an assumption that the application process was "complicated and time consuming".
If teachers had invested lots of effort into one Oxford applicant, who was eventually unsuccessful, there was a tendency to think it was "the end of the game", said Nicholson.
Research carried out for the government has shown that pupils from comprehensives are likely to do better at university than private or grammar school pupils with similar A-level results.
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