Unis claimed to discriminate against private school students

Top universities are discriminating against private school pupils, said Barnaby Lenon, chairman of the Independent School Council (ICS).

Eleven out of the 24 members of the Russell Group, including Warwick, are to increase state school admissions over the next five years following government demands for a socially-balanced student body.

Universities with tuition fees of more than £6000 are required to create access agreements that outline targets to ensure disadvantaged groups are not deterred from applying to them.

The definition of ‘disadvantaged’ is left to each university to decide, with many Russell Group institutions choosing to measure the number of state school admissions.

University College London (UCL) said that it aims to boost the proportion of its students from state schools by ten percent meaning that the private school representation will fall to 25 percent.

Lenon said that specific targets to increase state school student admissions were “wrong” and risked favouring affluent children from “selective grammar and middle-class comprehensives” while failing to “identify the most disadvantaged children”.

Les Ebdon, head of the office for fair access (OFFA) also warned of a middle-class bias.

Headmasters of private schools have demanded that leading universities are banned from setting targets that classify students according to their school type claiming that they educate many lower-income backgrounds with a third of their students on reduced fees.

Wendy Piatt, director general of the Russell Group, responded: “universities use a range of indicators – not only school type. Other measures include numbers of students who come from areas where few go to university or those who attend schools which have a poor record”.

Similarly, Oxford University stated in their access agreement that “there are students from relatively wealthy backgrounds at state schools, and students from relatively disadvantaged ones at independent schools”, and refused to use it as an access target.

Imperial College London said: “students from state schools are not a disadvantaged group in themselves”.

In spite of this, recent statistics showed that private school students still seem to have the advantage when applying to the most selective universities in the country, such as Warwick University.

Warwick University is among a number of Russell Group universities who increased the proportion of privately educated students recently. State school students accounted for 73.3 percent of the 2011/12 intake, a decrease from 75.2 % in 2010/11.

A report by Alan Milburn, the government’s social mobility tsar and former Labour cabinet minister, suggested that top universities should allow students from poorly-performing state schools with lower A-level grades than privately-educated peers to be admitted to make higher education “more representative” of society.

Universities plan to spend more than £700 million by 2017/18 – an increase of £100 million on last year – to widen participation, using summer schools, access schemes and direct work with schools.