Widening Access to Oxford
Welcoming visitors to a Balliol Open Day (image stolen from Balliol website!)
Here’s a little piece I wrote for Balliol’s in-house magazine about our Access work, in case anyone’s interested. We’d especially like to put these messages across to a) unhelpful media types (I’m looking at YOU, the Guardian), and b) rich potential funders of Access work!
*Ahem…:
If one had doubts about the value of Oxford and Balliol’s outreach work, they could quickly be dispelled by conversations with current undergraduates, or visitors to a Balliol Open Day. Oxford and Balliol’s access schemes play a crucial part in preventing potential applicants being overwhelmed by the false negative stereotypes that abound, and replacing these with positive, accurate messages: that Oxford/ Balliol is a centre for excellent, exciting learning; that most students at Oxford are friendly, academically interested, and ‘human beings just like you’; and that, since these students are ‘just like you’, you have a chance too- go for it! To so many of us (especially those who, like me, hailed from state schools with low records of sending students to Oxford or Cambridge), all this makes all the difference: we wouldn’t have applied without it.
There are, however, still barriers to Balliol’s capacity to successfully encourage applications from the hardest-to-reach students. The key focuses for Balliol at present are:
1) To change negative perceptions of Oxbridge amongst those teachers who dissuade excellent students from applying.
2) To attract more women to Balliol, and thus address the gender gap in the sciences and PPE.
3) To do all this and more with a very small budget, which is missing the external funding boost that has empowered other colleges to step up their outreach work in recent years.
I was sceptical about the force of teachers’ negative stereotypes until I helped at two Balliol Open Days and an interview period. My own experience of applying left me no doubts about the influence of teachers, but I couldn’t imagine such influence would be anything other than encouraging. Sadly, conversations with students from across the country revealed this wasn’t the case, and although many teachers do an excellent job (and I’ve insufficient evidence to speak about what is ‘typical’), again and again, negative stereotypes learnt from certain teachers (and the media) poured out: “Is it right that if you’re from a state school, they’ll try and catch you out by asking about really sophisticated books they know you won’t have read?”, “My teacher said there are lots of private school students here, and that I might feel like I don’t fit in. How do you cope with that?”, “Do you know anyone here from the North?”
It’s so important that school students, and those influencing them, understand the truth and the lies in such stereotypes. For example, a truth: the percentage of private school students at Oxford far exceeds proportionality with the UK population as a whole. The lie: this is because Oxford tutors favour students from private schools. The explanation? Students from state and private schools have exactly the same success at gaining places at Oxford, once they apply. The discrepancy arises because a smaller proportion of state school students are applying. Investigations into Balliol’s ‘gender gap’ have revealed a parallel picture: female applicants have the same success rate as men once they apply, but again, in many subjects, fewer women than men are applying.
Given that Oxford and Balliol are treating all applicants with an even hand (and pouring thousands into Access every year), what is deterring so many promising potential candidates? No doubt the new costs and confusion over tuition fees isn’t helping, but this factor is a new one, while the Access problem has a much longer history. Conversations with students at Open Days (so with students who’ve even made it that far!) do suggest that ironically, tragically, those teachers and journalists who do spread discouraging misinformation about elitism and exclusion at Oxford bear considerable responsibility for the statistics they bemoan.
Once here, one rarely notices (or even knows!) which friends are from state or private schools, and a small imbalance in a year’s gender mix will make no, or next to no, difference to one’s social life in an college of over 800 students. Having seen Oxford and Balliol’s access work from the inside, I can also confirm that we already work very hard to widen access. However, Access issues haven’t lost their importance. For the sake of giving hard-to-reach students the best, fairest chances, and in order to further boost Balliol’s own academic flourishing, we must, and will, do more.
Given the challenges Balliol faces, our approach to access has the following core tenets:
- Target talented students likely to be discouraged from applying (though never neglect or turn away interested schools).
- Open and sustain dialogues with teachers.
- Combine visiting schools with welcoming students into Balliol.
- Keep all activities highly interactive.
- Give students an honest and inspiring glimpse of life at Balliol, putting current students at the forefront of all our access work.
Looking at the tangible activities carried out by Balliol Access, we achieve a great deal with our small budget! Balliol has particular responsibility for outreach in Hertfordshire, and in 2011 Balliol visited Hertfordshire schools, held open days in the county, and ran a particularly successful Hertfordshire ‘Women in Science’ day. We also continue work beyond Hertfordshire, maintaining links with Old Members who teach and responding positively to all schools’ requests for visits to college. When school groups visit Balliol, our current students provide tours of the college, admissions tutors give a short talk, and maths and philosophy tutors have even volunteered free master-classes to give a taste of life at Oxford. This Easter, Balliol will be hosting a ‘UNIQ’ study day for maths, targeting students in schools that send few students to Oxbridge, or even university. Several Balliol students already partake in e-mentoring schemes, or have spoken about Oxford and Balliol in their old schools. And all this is not to mention Balliol’s headline access events: the Summer Open Days, which this year saw over 2000 visitors to the college over three days.
This hubbub of effective activity is sustained by student volunteers and the tutors and staff who work tirelessly to organise opportunities for them to represent Balliol and university in general. Unlike many Oxford colleges, Balliol has not been able to source external funding to employ staff to work full or part-time on outreach, and this has meant that almost all outreach work is achieved in the (elusive) “spare time” of tutors and students. This has really limited what we’ve been able to achieve through the enthusiasm and thoughtfulness of those on board with Balliol Access, and has left a marked gulf between our outreach activities and those of many other colleges.
We intend to do better. We are rightly proud of what we are achieving, and see Balliol Access’ ‘success stories’ every Michaelmas term in the new cohort of ‘freshers’. But it’s not enough, and neither Balliol, nor talented state school students and young women, must be allowed to fall behind. Therefore, we’ll keep pursuing ways to satisfy our great ambitions for Balliol’s outreach work, to ensure that more of the most exceptional students make it to what we know is our rather exceptional college.
Students on Balliol Quad. ... A quad is a lawn. Did I just destroy my entire thesis?
