University access: Les Ebdon will make no difference
Posted on Monday 20 February, 2012
Filed Under Education
THE Daily Telegraph is aghast at today’s appointment of Les Ebdon as head of the Office for Fair Access, openly voicing its fear that he will force ‘our’ best universities to take ‘less well-qualified candidates’.
I’m not quite sure just who the personal pronoun applies to in this context, but if the writer of those words is not talking in class terms, he or she might as well be.
Candidates with the best A-level scores are disproportionately drawn from the privately educated, of course, and therefore disproportionately likely to be the sons and daughters of Telegraph readers.
At bottom, the objection amounts to revulsion at the possibility that even a slightly higher proportion of fast track tickets to the most prestigious occupations will have to go to the slightly lower orders.
But of course one has to be careful about how one days these things these days, and instead of phasing it quite like that, the Telegraph editorial bases its case on a critique of Ebdon produced by a group of Tory MPs that masquerades under the risible designation of the Fair Access to University Group.
FUAG is all in favour of ‘removing barriers’ and ‘realising potential’ and encouraging ‘poorer youngsters’ to strive for academic excellence by studying more intellectually rigorous subjects.
That is not going to happen for these ‘poorer youngsters’. Even within state schools, educational outcomes are irreducibly class biased; so long as Britain is a class society, the children of middle class parents will on average secure better exam results than the children of working class parents.
Any quotas that Prof Ebdon sets will be filled overwhelmingly by that layer of middle class state school kids that previously made do with redbricks instead of Oxbridge.
In an era when student grants are gone and universities are charging the best part of thirty grand for a three-year undergrad course, the products of the places New Labour famously denigrated as Bog Standard Comprehensives will be just as excluded from ‘our’ best universities as they ever were.
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25 Responses to “University access: Les Ebdon will make no difference”
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Well, education has been abolished – for some reason.
I believe the Russell Group of top 20 universities takes in about 75,000 undergraduates each year, and there are about 4,000 secondary schools and sixth form colleges in the UK.
Assuming that intelligence and aptitude are evenly spread in society, i.e. the youth of Cardiff are no thicker than those of Chelsea, it would not be unreasonable to simply allocate these places proportionately by school.
I don’t know how many of the 75,000 places go to international students, but let’s assume 35,000 for argument’s sake and simple maths. This means each school/college would have 10 places to allocate each year to its best-performing upper-sixth pupils. (I appreciate that this doesn’t allow for the intricacies of course choice, but the general principle is sound).
This approach would be both meritocratic and progressive. It would, at a stroke, remove the inbuilt bias towards public schools, and might even lead to a healthier approach to local schools by the sharp-elbowed middle class.
I’m gobsmacked that Les Ebdon is going to get paid to come up with something less effective.
Hmm, I am not convinced by this argument…
As you know I am a Ruskin man and as my diploma course was coming to an end at Oxford I cast around for another berth. I applied for two degree courses at Manchester and one at Durham. They all interviewed me and all offered me a place. University College, Durham, even went so far as to offer to throw in a Middle Common Room set of rooms and give me MCR dining rights if I went there. In the end I went to Manchester, but that is not the point. University College made it plain that they were almost entirely public school intake and by taking a bloke who had left school at 15 and lived in a council house it did wonders for their reputation. I do not believe the position is any different today. Any working class person who can pass the exams will walk into an elite institution – we do not have to accept places at crappy polys along with the lumpen lower middle class.
Secondly we get a grant! We just do! It is not as tasty as it was in my day, but we still get a grant and a loan to pay our fees. Clearly the Labour Movement should be agitating for the abolition of fees for our people, but that is a pipe dream. Nevertheless, all working class people get a grant of about £3,250 a year, and access to loans, which is better than nothing.
A lot of people do not have this information and believe that decent universities are now out of their reach when clearly that is not the case. The left should be making all that plain.
“Any working class person who can pass the exams will walk into an elite institution”
Any comp-educated person, in fact.
There were four very bright kids in one year at the state primary where I was a governor. They all ended up getting four As at A-level, and three of them are in Oxbridge. The only one who didn’t make it was the one whose parents bust themselves to send him private for the two A-level years !
I don’t understand what is being said here. All my children went to university on the basis of the grades they got at A-level.
No doubt Oxbridge entrance requires more than good grades, and no doubt getting good grades is more difficult if you go to a basic comprehensive school rather than a school which aims at university entrance for its students.
So what do you want to do about it?
Perhaps university entrance is not the only measure of success, and perhaps schools should look to educating all their students for life in general, not just life in education. (As it is I think that is what they try to do, but they don’t do it very well.)
Watching the student protests, Laban Tall, and listening to them say how this government’s cuts will prevent working class people going to university, my chief reaction is that this is another issue that the middle class have hijacked for their own ends. The one big issue that effected us was the Education Maintenance Allowance, but that has not been forgotten about as only we got it.
The serious institutions are almost begging the council estates to send them candidates, but one of the problems is the attitude of schools and colleges to the Russell group. Put simply a lot of them try to talk their students out of applying for real universities, probably because the teachers are all poly wallahs and have a resentment towards anyone who isn’t thick as mince like them. I did a Cert FE once and there were only two of us on the course who had university degrees. The rest were wallahs and college of higher education merchants. Jesus, I remember when the EMU crisis hit and how those scumbags wept over their fucking mortgages. They hated being told that I had a council house and was quite grateful for my 15% interest on the deposit account.
Wiping dogshit like that off my shoe is something that I just love doing, but it does not solve the problem of how we can stop that dogshit from duping our people into believing that decent universities are not for them. That I feel is the root of the problem.
Far to much is made out of this university education. What have the university educated done for the majority? Name anything! A bunch of tax funded upper/middle class elites they are. Builders and engineers is what we need and some other clever people.
Isn’t this back to front?
Dim children are likely to result from dim parents (yes, it’s more complex than that).
Dim parents are likely to be poor.
It’s even worse than that! Eton is setting up a sixth form college in Newham, so that all the ‘disadvantaged’ kids down there (or at least the ones they deem most likely) can be groomed for the ‘elite’ universities. Still, you have to admire the Tories commitment to merotocracy (sarcasm). It’s a sop isn’t it, so that we think we have ‘the American Dream’ in this country. Of-course, I think every one should benefit from whatever type of education is best for them, but how will this shift ownership of the means of production?
Studies have shown that state educated pupils outperform pupils from private education at University.
So by simply looking at the grades you are no doubt excluding some of the brightest and best minds.
Clearly private kids are not smarter but have more and better resources to draw upon.
This sytem cannot deliver a meritocracy it can only deliver a reflection of its class based nature.
If we want a society where the best minds are identified and utilised to their fullest (in service of humanity) then we need a classless society.
Threads at Dave’s are a good indicator of the decline of political consciousness in Britain or more directly, the inability of the British middle classes, including supposed Marxists and laughably one-time “revolutionaries” to read and think, as I shall show below.
Jer argued this pile of shite and it barely causes a ripple:
The implications of this argument don’t penetrate the encumbered brains of Dave’s middle-class readership (or perhaps they do and they agree with Jer’s sentiment, who knows?), but Tory Jer is essentially arguing that the working class are stupid.
Now Jer might be unfamiliar with this fact but intelligence is randomly distributed across the population, however, outcomes under capitalism are not.
And here is the marvellous contradiction, capitalism favours the middle classes and they stack society towards their aims and impede the non middle classes, when they can, but capitalism in many respects is blind (or at least not so inherently conservative) to the class origins of its functionaries, it merely wants smart people to do a job and really couldn’t care if they are from Eton or the East End. This is evidence by London based in the rooms, the varied accents and their implications (and keep up, it is bleeding obvious).
As Dave gently points to it, the British education system is unquestionably tied to the class system in Britain. It supports and nurtures it.
The British middle classes by virtue of their existing privileges are keen to ensure that they hold onto them, whatever the wider implications.
So education and intellectual curiosity are rationed as a consequence, with the middle classes holding on to the levers of control and ensuring that their children and their classes children are the ones that gain preferential treatment, overall, in the education system.
But returning to Tory Jer’s point, it implies that the rich are not dim and in some way should be looked up to.
We can examine the proposition that intelligences randomly distributed across a population by examining Britain’s laziest and most unproductive family, The Windsors.
Members of the British Royal family are pampered from the day of their birth.
They receive quality private tuition, one-to-one training, expert advice on all matters. They have all the opportunities. They don’t need to work and whatever they do is hardly taxing, either physically or mentally compared to the work of others.
So with the best education in Britain what we find? Intellectual mediocrities.
As a sample growth of, I suppose, 20-30 people they have two that hold passable degrees. In another life the rest would be lucky to get a GCSE in washing dishes yet with all the help in the world, all the private tuition, these pampered and exceedingly rich individuals are mostly second-raters.
Again, class, opportunity and connections more often than not govern outcomes in capitalism, not intelligence. The notion that the poor or the work classing are stupid is a Tory idea and doesn’t tally with the available evidence, as we see with the British Royal family.
[If a middle-class or university educated individuals didn't understand my arguments I suggest they start again at the top, and reread several times.]
ghost. You have not made an argument that what you call the working class are not stupid. But you did give them a brief mention above.
is it just me or is that moderniTY a CuernT?
If only good breeding was all it takes, an awful lot of thoroughbreds would not end up in a Belgium sandwich.
Just in case some dimwits didn’t get my above examples and still feel that Jer has a case or that “Dim parents are likely to be poor.”
So what Jer is saying is poor parents are invariably dim.
Jer doesn’t provide any evidence to back up this contentious line of reasoning (if we can call it that), but leaves it out for natural Tories to nod their heads in agreement.
The reason why this notion is fallacious should be obvious:
1) Intelligence and abilities are largely an innate property of the person.
2) Being poor (or poverty) is an economic state of being, which is not necessarily connected to the former.
The two are not synonymous.
Again, person, economic state, different. Not same.
If people are still having difficulty understanding I could provide some simple examples, as I appreciate that repetition is favoured by the slow witted middle classes and their friends.
I’d certainly appreciate some simple examples, Modernity. And I think it would be really great if you could posit them in a really patronising, insulting manner indicative of the fact that you possess a mighty intellect capable of grasping insights denied to lesser mortals. Incidentally, it isn’t too late to get a university education if your lack of one really rankles so much, I can put you in touch with people at the OU who would be delighted to help you out.
the only people who atre werse than modernity on this here blerggHH are the outright nazis (labia Tall, Kenneth-mexican-child-fuckking-pornographer-Bellend, ellis-the smellis etc etc) and the assorted mentalist cuernts who infest the place. almost as bad as an article with coomenTT facilities on the guArdiean weblodge.
lesS abbEY – i have eaten Horse in a sandwhich. cooked like. the horse that is. horrible. werse than the opinions of divvi from the mOOn.
Dear Modernity:
“Just in case some dimwits didn’t get my above examples and still feel that Jer has a case or that “Dim parents are likely to be poor.”
So what Jer is saying is poor parents are invariably dim.”
Using a dictionary, please look up “likely” and “invariably”.
‘Morning all…
Willy, is the desire to open the bottle and get started getting to you? Do not fight your demons my little Trotsker, because if you do then you will have to face up to the awful reality of your pathetic existence. And the free entertainment would end.
Jer, why are you trying to debate with a computer programme? Didn’t you know that the Modbot has been set up to toss out a collection of phrases which at first glance look interesting, until you realise that there is nothing behind them?
Right – I trousered a couple of thousand pesos yesterday so am feeling well happy as it has helped pay for my holiday. My thanks go to the breeder of the seriously funky chicken concerned and to those retards who said that the bird was too scrawny to be game and thus gave him great odds.
Breakfast!
Sadly Jer, like a dim wit you haven’t provide *any* evidence to back up your assertion.
Presumably if you had some education (or read a couple of books) then you’d know that reasoned arguments are either substantiated by evidence or logic.
You have provided neither, but your assertions.
Which is rather dim.
Dear Sweet Modernity,
True, I have not provided any evidence that intelligence has a genetic component.
True, I have not proved that in general the less gifted tend to end up doing the jobs that command less pay.
Accordingly you can continue to believe that intelligence and earnings are entirely random things. Everybody wins.
The funny thing is Modernity that my comment addressed jer’s comments but you failed to spot this.
I shouldn’t have to give simple examples, but Jer’s point is the supposed connection between poverty (being poor) and being dim, then poor parenting.
We could apply his reasoning to several circumstances and see what comes out.
For example, Malawi is an incredibly poor country. Most of its parents are poor, most of its people are poor. More than 50% of the population live below the poverty line, yet if we applied Jer’s sweeping generalisation we would have to assume that they are also “dim”, by virtue of their economic state.
Which is, when you think about it utter nonsense.
Another example, during the 1930s in North East England there was immense poverty. Unemployment caused by the Great Depression and the lack of skilled jobs, the majority of parents were poor, yet if you applied Jer’s preposterous idea then they would be considered “dim”, because of their economic state.
Those are just two of many examples that could be given showing the stupidity of Jer’s comments.
please fuck off moDdErNiTiEY.
put your socks on nad fuck off. please. you are werese than the cretins (almost) who are nOTT yOuO