The new vice chancellor of Oxford, Prof Irene Tracey, has told The Times newspaper that there is “no conspiracy” against privately educated applicants.
But Prof Tracey who was formally admitted as the university’s 273rd vice-chancellor yesterday (Jan 10), said that recruitment would reflect increased competition from a greater diversity of applicants.
She said: “We don’t have state school quotas but will keep encouraging more to apply. There is no conspiracy against the privately educated but there is more competition.
“I’ve done admissions for 25 years so I can absolutely speak at the coalface about how we do it. There are no quotas. There are no biases, it’s so thorough and fair, and we work our socks off to make sure that we’ve got the best kids.
“I want applicants who think this is the right environment for them. I don’t want them put off or given some false impression. Inevitably, as we’ve opened up and done so much more on engagement, you’re going to have more competition and that’s going to be reflected in the numbers. That’s the reality.
“We will absolutely maintain the direction of travel, to be getting our message out there, to be engaging with as many schools and regions as we can.”
Prof Tracey, who is the first comprehensive-school educated vice-chancellor of Oxford, told The Telegraph that the university should not be so “binary” about its mix of undergraduates. She is against setting targets to grow the proportion of state school pupils.
She made the comments as debate continues about how to assess applicants’ backgrounds fairly, taking in individual factors that may not be obvious in the available data.
Prof Tracey told The Telegraph that her three children had been educated at state primary schools and private secondary schools. “I’m living and breathing the issues with my own family in terms of them going to secondary school in the private sector, so I understand all the arguments,” she said.
Prof Tracey said: “So it’s not restricting it to certain groups or certain sectors and certainly within that will be of course, a continuation in engaging with the state school sector…and the private school sector, which we absolutely recognize that we’ve got kids there who are on bursaries, increasingly, that you’ve got kids from disadvantaged backgrounds.
“It’s about a broader conversation [that] I think that we need to start having about the mix of students that were coming in and not being so sort of binary in that mix.”
Her comments come against a background of debate over who has access to undergraduate study at the country’s top universities, and whether disadvantaged pupils should take precedence even if they have slightly lower grades.
Those working in the independent sector have argued that defining students as “state” or “privately educated” does not capture important factors about individual students’ backgrounds.
In September, Helen Pike, master of Magdalen College School, Oxford, wrote about how independently-educated pupils eligible for free school meals can have this fact flagged in their applications.
Success rates for top independent school pupils applying for Oxford have fallen by a third in five years, The Telegraph says.
