Excellence is what matters, not the social quick fix

ADMISSIONS are a matter for universities, says Mrs Margaret Hodge, the Minister responsible for university education, quite unexceptionably, " Universities are in the business of hunting out the brightest students who will flourish."

Of course she is right. But it does not appear that that is what she really means, for her ministry has provoked a series of universities to announce that they intend to set numerical "targets" for the number of students to whom they give places from state schools and thus reduce the number taken from the more academically successful fee-paying sector.

It is as if the Government has failed to grasp the implications of manipulating figures for (even laudable) social ends even now after we have been through the Alevel debacle. Moreover, the Government looks as if it is trying to penalise merit and reward mediocrity - that, anyway, is how bright and cynical young people, and their teachers, will read what is going on.

There is only one fair and just way of increasing the number of able young people from disadvantaged homes who get places at the best universities and that is to keep improving the quality of their school education and then to encourage them to apply and try their chances.

That method works. Slowly it will alter the social composition of our universities and it will do so on a basis of transparency and of competitive excellence, fairly judged.

Every student who gets a place will know that he or she deserves it. The Government will then derive justified satisfaction from the achievement.

BUT to go for the quick fix via deliberate discrimination will bring about a series of disastrous and unintended consequences. To tell 17-year-olds from one kind of school that they are not wanted, however hard they strive and to tell students with poor qualifications that they can come, however meagre their achievement, is to steer our entire university life towards an abyss.

It will lead from day one to anger and injustice. It will pit children against their parents and against their schools and teachers. It will breed a generation of embarrassed and discomforted graduates, riddled with guilt.

It will drive people with high ability to America. It will dismiss more talent than it garners.

Consider some of the paradoxes. Many of the best of our fee- paying schools give scholarships to the children

of impecunious parents.

They might have spent only two years in the sixth form of the school concerned.

Anyone who has been given such a start in life is likely to be exceedingly able, but will now carry the stigma of privilege. Many children of the middle class go to state schools, as I did myself. They often have the helpful privilege of bookish homes - but now they will be able to gain the further blessings of positive discrimination.

The Government has singled out certain postcodes for special educational help and the universities benefit from a financial " post code bounty" as one Vice Chancellor recently said to me; but he had discovered that 45 per cent of his intake from the favoured (ie known- tobepoor) postcodes were paying the full tuition fee and were thus not drawn from homes that are poor. Unfortunately the facts of society never fit the neat preconceived compartments of the would-be social manipulators. How sad, how damnably sad, that some universities are being forced to enter this realm of social discrimination - and just for the money.

Of course ministers and governments have a role to play in advancing the cause of education and New Labour has good and sincere intentions. But they ignore the autonomy of the institutions concerned only at their peril. As Mrs Hodge rightly says, admissions are a matter for universities. But she is determined also to believe that that "there is discrimination against bright, young, high- achieving people from state schools". That is political pathology, not observation of present-day facts. We all derive our opinions and

images of schools and universities from our own past experience - even teachers, even ministers. But we are always out of date when we rely, albeit unconsciously, on the experiences of 30 years before, because everything changes. The neat jibes and prejudices we gathered as teenagers and as students are all out of date and yet the powerful continue to visit them on new generations.

That lies behind so much of the nonsense currently visited upon Oxford, where we are all sick and tired of the insults and insinuations which Labour Ministers continually heap on us.

We know and our students know that it is, like other UK universities, a socially open and unsnobbish institution, with a few kids in the odd corner still playing Edwardian social games, the exception rather than the rule. It is committed utterly to the pursuit of the excellent, religiously, meticulously, and to the exclusion of all else. We know when we meet first-rate students.

We know the difference between those with high potential and those who have just been trained to interview well. We choose our students before they take A-levels and know how dodgy A-levels are if used as the sole criterion of selection. We know the good students we would have missed if we relied only on A-levels.

My college has even taken brilliant people with poor or no A- levels, who have been turned down by other universities because we have interviewed them for an hour or two and read what they've written and seen what others have said about them. Not all universities have the luxury of being able to spend that amount of time on one individual, but because of the extreme desire of many students to come here we invest enormous energy and resources in the selection process. Are we now to throw all of those efforts to the winds and take people because they seem to belong to a favoured social group?

THAT is why Oxford has rejected the invitation to impose quotas. We believe that in time our efforts to attract able students from everywhere (with the help of rising school standards) will indeed result in our having many more students from schools which currently do not send them to us. But we will not reduce the standards we look for in the young people we select, whatever Ministers urge us to do and whatever they threaten us with. In the longer run they will realise that the path of proven excellence is the only one to take.

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