A foot in the door

Andrew Dilnot is the only principal of an Oxford college to have been educated at a comprehensive school. Does this mean he will revolutionise admissions?
Andrew Dilnot
Andrew Dilnot: "Students fear they will be surrounded by people who are socially different, and I feel powerfully they're wrong about that." Photograph: Frank Baron

Andrew Dilnot, principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford, and pro vice-chancellor of the university, is jabbing his finger at the Guardian front page. "Look at that!" he says, eyes ablaze. The offending object is the figure $25bn that is highlighted in a panel as the annual global value of the food and drink additive industry.

"Is that a big number?" Dilnot demands. I say it looks quite big to me. "Well, it's £12.4bn and there are 6 billion people in the world, so it's about £2 each," he replies. "Is £2 a big number? You see, there will be about 30 different numbers on the front of a broadsheet, and numbers are just a particular class of words. There isn't any other class of words in a paper that we wouldn't ask ourselves what they mean."

Dilnot is passionate about numbers. He presents More or Less, a Radio 4 weekly show about numbers in the news, and, with Michael Blastland, the programme's creator, has just published an entertaining book, The Tiger That Isn't, which argues that numbers should hold no fears for us. Some people get upset about ill-treatment of dogs or rainforests or Bangladeshi sweatshop workers. Dilnot is driven to rage by ill-treatment of numbers.

He recalls the Paddington rail crash of 1999 and how John Prescott, asked about the cost of a new braking system, said: "A million, a billion, I don't care." Dilnot seems to feel it almost as a personal affront. "No, I'm sorry. A million seconds is 11 days, a billion seconds is 32 years. There's a big difference."

But I haven't come to talk to him about numbers - at least not these particular numbers. Appointed to St Hugh's four years ago at the age of 43, Dilnot is the first and so far only Oxford principal to be educated at a comprehensive. It wasn't, moreover, a leafy Surrey school, but a giant mixed comprehensive of nearly 2,500 pupils, built from cement in the middle of a Swansea council estate. True, he went there, in his second year of secondary school, with what sociologists call cultural capital: a father who was a successful businessman; and four years at prep school at Sevenoaks in Kent and one year at a grammar in Maidstone. The comprehensive, Olchfa, despite the council estate, had a wide catchment area and a large middle-class intake. But only one pupil before him had been to Oxford or Cambridge. In Dilnot's year, 15 went, which he attributes to a determined deputy head, who investigated how the entry system worked and pushed Dilnot and others through maths A-level a year early.

So even when Dilnot was reading PPE at St John's College nearly 30 years ago, it was evident that "there is a hurdle to be overcome just to get to the point of applying". Had he been born two years earlier, he probably wouldn't have gone to Oxford, whereas if he had attended, say, Westminster, there would have been little doubt. As long ago as the 1960s, a commission of inquiry declared that in its admissions, Oxford was wanting in "academic efficiency and social justice" and was "vulnerable to the suspicion of privilege".

Now Dilnot occupies a senior university position and the same complaints are heard, with the Sutton Trust reporting in September that a third of all admissions to Oxford and Cambridge go to just 100 schools, only two of them comprehensive. Eton alone has sent 273 students to Oxford in the past five years and Westminster 258. Why has so little changed? And what is Dilnot doing about it?

"I'm pretty confident that the process once they have applied does a decent job," he says. "We have a problem in persuading people from all parts of the country to apply. We haven't found the right recipe on that. They fear they will be surrounded by people who are socially different, and I feel powerfully that they're wrong about that."

Making progress

But the Sutton Trust report suggests that they are right? "Once students arrive, they all seem the same. By and large - obviously there are a few who don't want to join the melting pot - they dress in the same way, do the same things, have the same interests. If you came here and sat at lunch with the undergraduates, you'd struggle to say which had been to which schools. The best thing is to get pupils from state schools here to meet our students. We are getting their teachers along to meet the students, too. It will be a slowish process. But we're moving in the right direction."

The Sutton Trust research suggests that, even among the applicants, students from state schools don't stand as good a chance as those from fee-charging schools. Dilnot, however, argues that the entry hurdle is the same for nearly everybody: promising candidates get an offer conditional on three A-level A grades. "That still gives us a lot of leeway. There are more than 25,000 who get three As, and we admit 3,000 of them. We pick up people who do badly at GCSE, which are the only results we have when we see them."

Should Oxford make lower A-level offers to students who have suffered disadvantage, educationally and socially? "We are very exam-based, and people who struggle to get three As are likely to struggle here. If we allow somebody in who misses their grades, then, with few exceptions, they are very miserable indeed. A few years ago I looked very closely at the correlation, and it was very high. We're deliberately seeking to take people with a particular gift, and to enhance it, and that seems to me entirely sensible."

It was perhaps naive of me to think that a principal from a comprehensive would be more committed to social justice than other senior figures at Oxford. Dilnot is not moved by political projects but by analysis and accurate information, particularly in numerical form. He has spent nearly all his adult life staying carefully neutral.

He was director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), once described as "one of the most yawn-inducing names in the London phone book". It has become, nevertheless, the most respected of British thinktanks. Much of its work may be on esoteric subjects, but the conclusions are designed to inform public debate. Academics, argues Dilnot, don't do enough of that, particularly since the advent of the research assessment exercise. He says a separate stream of funding is needed to encourage it.

The IFS's success is based on being rigorously non-partisan and non-ideological. Dilnot was a brilliant director - he held the position for 11 years and worked there for a decade before that - partly because he perfectly embodied its institutional values. Did he ever join demonstrations as a student? "No, I didn't ever march. Perhaps in a different environment I might have become political, but I find it hard to imagine." Was he naturally apolitical? "Yes, yes." Would he describe himself as instinctively to the left or the right? "I wouldn't." Like a BBC newsreader? "Yes, yes."

He tells me later he is a practising Anglican; this isn't anything to do with his family, but something he decided on at university. "Economics doesn't tell you what to do. I think of government as a great big engine of redistribution. There are no overwhelming financial reasons for free education or free health. So you have to have a set of values. Political judgment depends on a sense of what is right." This is the nearest he comes to any statement of belief, but he seems deliberately to put it in a separate box from the rest of his life.

Dilnot makes a virtue of dullness. "At the IFS we always tried to make sure our press releases said a little less than could be said. If you wrote a dull press release, you had a good chance of not being misrepresented." Yet he is not a dull man. Witty, classless and mildly self-deprecating, he succeeded at the IFS partly because he looked good on television and could deliver a crisp soundbite.

Enlightened policy

And in one respect he was very radical: he encouraged part-time working and achieved a big rise in the number of women in senior positions. But after talking over flexible working arrangements with one female employee, "I thought to myself: I've got children as well and, as an economist, 'I believe in the backward-bending labour supply curve'." I say I don't know what a backward-bending thingy is. He explains it's when a worker finds the value of extra leisure exceeds the value of extra wages. Having completed the necessary equations, Dilnot took a salary cut so he could have the summer holidays off each year.

He then introduced his enlightened employment policies to St Hugh's. Oxford, he says, has too few women academics, and that has got worse since colleges such as St Hugh's, which used to be women- only, went co-ed. "It's very hard now to get a permanent academic job until you're in your 30s and maybe your mid-30s. Many able women leave the profession before they get one because by then they're having children." So he has started postdoctoral "career development fellowships" for people in their mid-20s. The teaching load is light, giving time to complete research and get published, so that they are professionally established before they start families. The positions are not, and cannot be, exclusively for women, but of five so far, only one is a man.

Does Dilnot also have radical ideas for improving the nation's numeracy? Whose fault is it that we're so hopeless at numbers? "It's all our faults. It's the fault of politicians. It's the fault of the media. If editors were more irritated when innumerate journalism is done, journalists wouldn't do it. It's the fault of Whitehall permanent secretaries, too, because they don't demand good, accurate numbers, and so policy is less well-informed than it should be. We need a whole culture that engages with numbers."

Are schools to blame? Should they change how they teach maths? "I don't know the answer. There is something that isn't maths that is engaging with data and numbers," he says. So children should learn fewer differential equations, more statistics? "We should take numbers more seriously, but it's not so obvious they should displace maths. Perhaps they're part of citizenship."

Despite an exotic background - by Oxford standards at least - Dilnot has led a remarkably sheltered and, dare I say it, limited life. A degree at Oxford, two decades at the IFS and then back to work in Oxford, running the college where, as an undergraduate, he met his wife. It's all very cosy and very English. Even his IFS job came through his tutor, who originally sent him there for a summer holiday attachment.

It is the English habit to absorb diverse people into the establishment, and although Oxford has many academics who claim to hate privilege and injustice, they all (in my experience) think Oxford is wonderful. So it is hardly to be expected that the apolitical Dilnot will take a different view. He will work quietly and conscientiously towards getting more pupils from comprehensives into the university, diffidently holding himself up as an example of what can be achieved. But he won't blaze the revolutionary trail that some of Oxford's critics think is necessary.

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