When I was a student at Oxford, a tutor at my college told me that it was always possible to tell whether an interviewee went to a state school or private school. This was before they’d read their application, before they’d even spoken. It was from the colour of their socks. State school boys would always wear white socks; their privately-educated counterparts preferred patterns and colours.
What this particular tutor did with such powers of perception was unclear, but the point of the anecdote was this: it was near impossible, no matter the college’s outreach initiatives and commitment to access and all such worthy things, to be blind to class background.
At historically elitist institutions, this kind of thing matters. Despite goodwill and the best intentions, it is hard to shift culture – even those well aware of their biases struggle to overlook them. So in 2019, Oxford introduced a 25 per cent admissions target for students from deprived places, and Cambridge set a 69 per cent target for state school admissions, in an attempt to chase change that didn’t come fast enough naturally, and was becoming politically more urgent (remember, that was the time when Brexit was still fresh, of the “left behind” and “rugby league towns”, the year Boris Johnson took the “Red Wall”).
But Cambridge dropped its target in 2024. And one of its colleges, Trinity Hall, is now going further – targeting private schools mostly in the south of England for student recruitment, according to a memo obtained by the Guardian. College fellows approved a policy of approaching a set of private schools – including Eton, Winchester and St Paul’s Girls – to avoid “reverse discrimination” and ensure “exceptionally well-qualified” applicants. “Many” privately educated applicants “have faced considerable personal or financial challenges”, claimed the college’s director of admissions in the memo. (Disadvantaged private school pupils are hardly a huge untapped demographic: only 7 per cent of private school pupils are on bursaries or means-tested scholarships.)
Though it doesn’t look good, there may be justification for the University dropping its overall state school target. There are other factors in a pupil’s life – being on free school meals, perhaps, or growing up in care – that might be more relevant to their circumstances than the type of school they went to. The university watchdog, the Office for Students, doesn’t include specific school type in its guidelines for improving access, after all.
But it is difficult to imagine Trinity Hall corralling pet private schools a few years ago. The recent backlash to DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) initiatives can manifest in peculiar ways. DEI is mostly demonised by its critics as based on too narrow a definition of diversity – one preoccupied with race or gender over other considerations, such as diversity of thought, place, class. An exercise in middle-class guilt and condescension that ignores those held back not by their sexuality, gender or colour of their skin but their accent, their schooling, their class. It’s an argument with some merit but doesn’t, in fact, undermine the principle of positive discrimination – just prefers to positively discriminate in favour of other people.
Pushing quotas and targets aside can create a new vacuum – one very quickly filled with the sighs of relief of establishment self-styled meritocrats eager to embrace the status quo ante, and return to, in this case, the old-school tradition of Oxbridge colleges fostering links with particular public schools. Mine, for example, had a relationship with a London public school dating back to the time of Elizabeth I. When I arrived in 2008, I was surprised at how many of my intake were still drawn from that one school, despite the historic tradition of awarding scholarships exclusive to that school (positive action!) being long gone.
Trinity Hall’s new policy is not a laissez-faire, we-just-want-the-best position. It is another form of identity politics – just one that swaps the rainbow lanyard for the old school tie. And there is little chance that fishing for students from a handful of extremely socially narrow institutions will broaden diversity of thought, or much else for that matter. DEI is dead, long live DEI.
[Further reading: Would a progressive alliance defeat Reform?]
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