How we gave Oxford University applicants a level playing field
We have been talking a lot about fairness this year at Oxford, with conversations revolving around the university’s recent commitment to transform admissions. Last week saw the news of a step forward on that path, with 69% of UK offers being made to state school students, an increase from just 56% five years ago. Colleges and departments have been making use of the data that underpins the university’s access programmes to ask themselves an important question: what does it mean for access to Oxford to be “fair”?
At my college, Worcester, we agreed on what so many in higher education perceive as the most obvious definition: access can be considered “fair” when the group of students to whom offers are made is representative of those who achieve AAA or higher at A-level. This year we met this definition of fairness for three under-represented groups: state school students (who account for 83% of our offer holders, and 73% of those who achieve AAA+ at A-level); those living in areas with low likelihood of progression to higher education (20%; 13%); and those living in socioeconomically disadvantaged areas (22%; 11%).
We don’t have the whole picture for all underrepresented groups, because Ucas has not yet provided us with data on how many of our offer-holders are BAME. But this was a serious step up for a college where 10 years ago only 58% of offer-holders were state school educated. Here’s how we did it.
By analysing contextual data, we were able to look at how certain kinds of advantages and disadvantages affected our applicants’ likelihood of being offered a place. It was not the case that state school educated and disadvantaged students were not applying, or achieving highly at school: between 2014 and 2018, 2,000 of the disadvantaged students who were not made offers by Oxford went on to achieve AAA or higher. We knew first-hand that disadvantaged students did not perform less well than their peers once they arrived on course, so their academic potential was not in question. We needed to look closely at how we went about assessing it.
A huge range of factors are known to affect performance in the application process, including school type, access to experiences beyond the curriculum, opportunities to develop particular kinds of cultural capital and familiarity with higher education. Expecting all applicants to perform in similar ways was disadvantaging those who had not had the privilege of being taught how to make their abilities legible against the kinds of metrics used in university admissions processes.
The most disadvantaged students became more than twice as likely to be offered places as the most advantaged
Once we had begun to think critically about our expectations of applicants – and to admit to ourselves that it was not fair to expect potential to look the same in applicants who had had vastly different opportunities – something changed. We looked at the kinds of questions we were asking and the kinds of answers we were expecting, we interrogated our own and each others’ assumptions about different forms potential might take in an applicant, and asked our admitting tutors to come together for a conversation about how to use contextual data to recognise diverse potential. As we sought to uncouple privilege from the assessment of potential, the most disadvantaged students became more than twice as likely to be offered places as the most advantaged. This kind of statistic sometimes draws accusations of “social engineering” but bear with me: all of our offer-holders, regardless of background, are expected to achieve similar A-level grades.
It is obvious why those who have achieved these against a background of disadvantage should have a higher rate of success. That is not to say that there are not some very privileged offer-holders in Worcester’s cohort this year, but these students have their places for exactly the same reasons: because their potential impressed the tutors in the context of the opportunities and advantages they had had.
We are proud to be representative of those who achieve AAA+ at A-level, but the group of students who achieve AAA+ nationally is not representative of society (about 87% of the population of students are in state schools). There is much to be done to address the inequalities in all levels of our society and education system, but we don’t need to wait for that work to be done before access to universities can be “fair”. We have learnt something this year at Worcester: universities can have fair access now, by learning to recognise diverse potential.
Marchella Ward is the Tinsley Outreach Fellow at Worcester College, Oxford