More state school pupils have been offered places at Oxford University than at any time in the past 40 years, after it responded to accusations of social exclusion by investing heavily in outreach projects.
Nearly six in 10 places have been offered to pupils from state schools, up from 55.6% of places taken last year. That still leaves about four in 10 places for the estimated 7% of British schoolchildren who are educated privately.
Oxford’s head of undergraduate admissions, Dr Samina Khan, said the university took diversity “incredibly seriously”.
Although university officials do not yet know how many state school pupils will take up places, they expect the final rate to be the highest intake from the state sector for decades.
Prof Les Ebdon, director of fair access to higher education, said the figures were “good news”. It was, he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, “a result of the long-term, sustained outreach work that [Oxford] have been doing to attract more applications from disadvantaged students”. However, he added that there was still more work to do.
Part of the problem, Ebdon said, was that society was less socially mobile than it was 40 years ago. “One of the puzzles is how can we restore the mobility, and there are theories about that,” he said.
But he said it was “giving the message out that Oxford is a university which is open to a wide diversity of people, by getting out there, for example, with their summer school programme”.
Oxford says its total spend on outreach across the university and colleges is more than £6m a year, and that it spends a further £10m a year on financial support for students.
Members of the collegiate university last year took part in more than 3,000 outreach activities across the country – a near 40% increase on the number that took place in 2011-12 – reaching more than 3,400 schools, its spokesperson added.
Commenting on the figures, Khan said: ‘We take our commitment to diversifying Oxford incredibly seriously – our work in recent years especially through initiatives like our UNIQ summer school for state school students has been about targeting the students and schools that are most underrepresented at Oxford.
“These figures, along with our continuing progress towards our access agreement targets for disadvantaged groups of students, are a positive indication that all our work is bearing fruit. That we are seeing progress during a time of potentially destabilising changes to university fees, school curriculum and qualifications is all the more encouraging.”
