January 2010

by Andrew Grant
Headmaster, St Albans School; Chairman, The Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference (HMC)

In November, the Business Secretary, a Labour politician the length of whose title rivals that of a nineteenth century Ruritanian Archduke, launched “Higher Ambitions”, the government’s vision for the future of universities. The way in which the most eye-catching aspect of this was reported: “Middle class children cannot assume that good A-level results will win them a place at university under Government plans for colleges to judge applicants on the basis of their social background”, stirred up a predictable media storm in which I was quite happy to join, being quoted in several papers in describing the proposal as looking “sinister”.
It was widely seen as an early salvo in Gordon Brown’s pre-election class war, which, coming from the recently-ennobled Baron Mandelson of Foy in the county of Herefordshire and Hartlepool in the county of Durham, provided ironies to be relished.
I freely admit that there may have been a degree of ad hominen instinct in my choice of adjective - one that the gentleman in question has tended to attract throughout his political career.
Nonetheless, I think it was accurate: there is something sinister in an authoritarian government that holds the purse strings exerting any kind of pressure, even indirect, on the freedom of academic institutions to determine who should be admitted to study there. Still more sinister is the fact that this is pressure that has already been applied, through the Schwartz report of 2004, which was, itself, the consequence of an ignorant and nakedly political attack by Gordon Brown, speaking well away from his brief as Chancellor, on the admissions procedures of Oxford University in general, and Magdalen College in particular, in what became universally known as the “Laura Spence affair”.
In the event, Professor Schwartz, honest academic that he is, came up with a very even-handed report that established some important principles and went a long way to improving the fairness and transparency of admissions procedures in a number of universities.
It would now appear this was not what the government intended or wanted and certainly not nearly radical enough in advancing its social and political agenda. So it is that, in a move redolent of the Irish Government’s insistence on holding referenda on the Lisbon Treaty until the electorate came up with the right answer, the Director of Fair Access, Sir Martin Harris, has been asked to have another go, but with a much more highly directed brief than merely seeking to achieve fairness. His report next spring will be explicitly about how more can be done to widen access to the most highly selective institutions for those from the most disadvantaged backgrounds.
As Alan Milburn’s report on social mobility, (originally intended to be the Laura Spence affair on a grand scale and which began life as the “Panel on Fair Access to the Professions” but morphed into “Unleashing Aspiration”) makes clear, and as the Sutton Trust has belatedly realised, even top universities can’t offer places to people who don’t apply to them, nor to candidates who have done the wrong subjects at A level, so the major effort ought to be directed at addressing the poverty of aspiration in too many homes and too many schools.
However, acknowledging this to be a counsel of perfection, can we agree with Lord Mandelson that, “Nobody should be disadvantaged or penalised on the basis of the families that they come from or the schools they attended, and the way in which a simple assessment based on A-level results might exclude them”? He added that this was not a class issue, saying, “There are middle class pupils who don’t perform well, that have a strong aptitude and strong potential.”
On the face of it there is not much to quarrel with here. We are all in favour of discovering hidden talent and helping it to flourish by compensating for prior disadvantage, provided the talent really is there and is genuine. It then becomes a question of finding valid, reliable and accurate contextual data to try to measure disadvantage.
What some fear is that the principle that nobody should be disadvantaged or penalised on the basis of the families that they come from or the schools they attended will operate in only one direction, so that getting poor grades won’t disadvantage you if they’re better than the average at your bad school, but good grades won’t be enough if they’re lower than the average at your good school.
Some approaches to the problem of inequality of background seek to reduce the quantum of unfairness for one group by increasing it for another. The logic runs thus: Life has been unfair to Group X so we must take responsibility for introducing some unfairness into the lives of Group Y.
For those of you who are interested, it’s a subset of what, as a teacher of Critical Thinking, I have learned to identify as the tu quoque fallacy and fallacy it is.
It implies that to be intelligent and have been well educated among equally intelligent peers is a condition to be penalised. A number of highly selective universities make a calculation based on the DCSF’s GCSE school performance data to produce a “standardisation measurement” which allegedly takes into account the educational context in which students have achieved their results by rewarding high individual performance relative to the performance of the whole school at GCSE.
Interestingly, though the DCSF won’t include IGCSE in its Performance Tables, there seem to be no scruples among such universities about including it in this measure, otherwise Winchester College, Manchester Grammar, and many other HMC schools, would be benefiting from their status as failing schools as shown by their spectacular lack of GCSE passes, so I do wonder where the universities are getting their data.
I can see no philosophical basis for it other than a premise that pupils from schools with a so-called “modifier” above 0.0 are deemed to need some degree of compensation for what their schools have failed to do for them relative to those with a “modifier” of zero. To judge from one such table, pupils at the overwhelming majority of schools in England need compensating.
It is a rather shocking proposition that some of our finest universities tacitly believe that they have to compensate for the failure, to a greater or lesser degree, of the overwhelming majority of the schools managed by the DCSF to fulfil their pupils’ potential.
However, it seems to me an innately flawed approach that unjustly denigrates good schools. It is inevitable that a properly-performing genuine comprehensive school will register less well in the school performance tables than a selective school even if it is doing a sensationally good job by its ablest candidates. In any case, some neighbourhood comprehensives, several in my own city being cases in point, have catchment areas more affluent than those of many a grammar school, whilst many a highly academic independent school, my own included, has more than a few sixth formers in receipt of EMAs and some whose parents are on income support .
The statistics of school performance are not a good proxy for the whole educational context in which a child has grown up. Even post codes, inexact though they be, provide more relevant contextual data.
However, setting aside the further point that it doesn’t provide poor schools with much incentive to improve if their pupils get extra grades for their school’s poor performance, such an exercise might still be justifiable, depending on the stage in the Admissions Process at which it is used.
If it’s a matter of getting people onto the playing field in the first place, so that they are actively considered at a later and more crucial stage, for example an interview, where, without some compensatory factor, they might not even make it that far, I see nothing wrong in that. To use it as a discriminator between equally-qualified candidates also seems to me legitimate. But if it’s used to tilt the playing field, so that, in effect, their grades are valued at a higher rate than those of equally, or better qualified candidates, and for that to become a deciding factor in who gets an offer, there is a lot wrong with it.
However much innate potential a student may have, to make a successful start on a demanding degree course and to complete it successfully, requires a certain level of prior attainment, and however inadequate, academic qualifications remain the best measure of prior attainment and predictor of future success. So, if the standard grade offer set by a university doesn’t merely reflect how selective it can afford to be but is also an indication of the ability needed to succeed at that institution, there must be risks in deviating too far from it.
No one would seriously dispute that a student from a background where good GCSEs are a rarity and who achieves three A grades at A level in a school where such a feat is unprecedented, has done something considerably more impressive than a student from St Albans who scrapes three A grades because it’s almost unthinkable not to. But if the latter were edged out of a university place by a special access candidate with three B grades, and/or by someone who subsequently dropped out, I don’t think that would be an example of fair admissions.
Until next August, no candidate for a highly-selective university, from however high-performing a school, has been able to show ability in any A level subject at any grade higher than A. In August, all that changes. Thereafter, universities that claim to be selecting the ablest candidates, best fitted to benefit from three years of rarified academic study, will be on dubious moral ground in making preferential offers to candidates whilst ignoring the evidence of the highest achievement provided by the A* grade.
My apologies to readers who assumed from the title this was going to be an article about groundsmanship.