University chief: Treat state pupils as disadvantaged
Bristol University makes allowances for pupils from poor schools (Adrian Sherratt)
Documents obtained under freedom of information laws show that the admissions strategy group at Bristol University recommended last year that admissions tutors take into account the type of school attended by candidates when making offers of places.
Attendance at state school should be deemed an “indicator of disadvantage”, said Tony Hoare, director of what the university calls its “widening participation research cluster”.
Bristol is already a frontrunner in using positive weighting in admissions. Its policy of making allowances for pupils from schools with a poor record of performance has been followed by other top universities seeking to meet government targets to increase their state-school intake.
A recent survey of universities showed 56.7% planned to use “contextual data” — additional information that is considered alongside Ucas applications. This could result in pupils from state schools being offered places conditional on lower grades than their private-school counterparts because of their “potential”.
At a meeting of Bristol’s admissions, recruitment and widening participation strategy group in April last year, it was suggested that the vice-chancellor’s advisory group should “explore whether the university should revert to differentiating by school type [that is, state v independent] in our widening participation strategy”.
A separate paper by Hoare raised concerns about the university’s policy of using the performance record of an applicant’s school when deciding whether to give lower offers, because of the poor quality of data on many schools.
“In contrast, a school-based [school type] approach . . . offers many advantages over school-performance data,” it said.
The university denied last week that it was planning to discriminate in favour of state school pupils. “We review our approach to contextual admissions regularly and have recently confirmed our commitment to our now well-established approach of assessing applications holistically by setting academic achievement in the context of school performance. We do not take school type into account,” said a spokesman.
However, the revelation that it has considered such a move will incense heads at private schools who already question the use, in admissions, of information about a student’s background, such as whether they attended a poor school or live in a deprived area.
In 2002 Bristol was boycotted by leading independent schools, which were convinced that its admissions policy discriminated against them.
Chris Ramsey, co-chairman of the Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference universities committee and headmaster of The King’s School in Chester, said it was “absurd” to class state school pupils as disadvantaged.
“We are in favour of intelligent, transparent use of contextual data where it can inform admissions. But use of ‘school type’ is neither intelligent nor transparent: not all independent schools are the same, nor are all state schools,” he said.
Bristol’s state-school intake stood at about 55% at the end of the 1990s. In 2003 it was 61%. But the most recent figures from 2011-12 show that the proportion has slipped back to 59.9%.
Cardiff University has recently begun a flagging system where applicants from areas where few young people go to university or who live in deprived areas will be guaranteed an offer or an interview.
From 2014, Edinburgh, which started using contextual data in 2004, will allocate extra admission points to applicants who live in areas of deprivation.
Leeds has appointed a “contextual admissions manager”.
