Oxford and Cambridge are rightfully the preserve of society’s elite. By scrapping the state school target, we’ll return to the good old days - snatching the dreaming spires out of the hands of the hoi polloi, and returning them to the landed Henrys who rightfully deserve it.

Or so the media would have you believe. Private schools in Britain occupy a uniquely emotional position in the public psyche. One side will have you believe that they are the chief nurse of all of Britain’s social ills. The other will lament that their detractors are trying to destroy one of Britain’s few remaining world-class exports. Irrespective of which side you sit on, the fervour has created the wrong political incentives - the result of which is the state school target.

The decision to increase the share of state-educated students at Oxford and Cambridge was not a concerted policy decision - it was a knee-jerk response to the public outrage surrounding the Laura Spence affair. There has thus rarely been a mature public discussion surrounding the University’s widening participation policies.

Suppose you believe that the ends are desirable - that is, the University ought to assess the academic potential of candidates, not necessarily their academic achievement. The state school target is not the best way of going about achieving this.

“The loser in all of this is not the well-heeled, rather it is the student who lives 50 miles from the closest grammar school, and whose local comprehensive has sent 1 student to Oxbridge over the past decade.”

Before I am accused of kicking away the ladder, let me be straight with you. I studied at one of the highest-achieving grammar schools in the country. Of the 150 students that graduate upper sixth each year, about 25% go on to Oxbridge - and in the past 5 years, this share has increased from 20% to 40%. We benefited from interview coaching with alumni, entrance exam preparation, the drafting and re-drafting of personal statements - everything one might expect from a school far above its “station.”

Few students came from genuinely deprived backgrounds - house prices in the area started at three-quarters of a million pounds. And yet the University would accept us in droves, patting themselves on the back, to the detriment of those elsewhere who may have had a higher marginal benefit of a Cambridge education. The loser in all of this is not the well-heeled, rather it is the student who lives 50 miles from the closest grammar school, and whose local comprehensive has sent 1 student to Oxbridge over the past decade.

The easy fix, one might suggest, is to differentiate between comprehensive and grammar schools - and then set a “comprehensive school target.” Such a target, whilst it might go further in widening access, would completely distort the foundations of the British education system. If a local comprehensive was put on a pedestal vis-à-vis its local grammar, what incentive would remain to go to the grammar? Such a move would only depress academic achievement. The problem lies not with the grammar school as an institution, but from its geographic distribution: more than a third are in Kent and London. Blame the end of the tripartite system.

A better system would be a more holistic one - one that contextualised a student’s performance against families of a similar level of income, against secondary schools with a similar median family income, and so on. Instead of treating state schools as a homogeneous unit, such measures would allow for a like-to-like comparison.

“Rightly or wrongly, higher education in Britain is still viewed through an Oxbridge prism”

Why isn’t this done already? One reason is that we risk making the admissions system opaque - not too unlike the American system - where a hundred of a candidate’s characteristics are thrown into a magical black box, and out pops a result: admit or reject. Such a system would mean that the success of the University’s widening participation measures could not be accurately or quantitatively assessed. Parents, too, would be rightfully in arms at a perceived - but invisible - injustice. One need only look at how politicized American higher education has become. An effective middle ground, then, would be to use only a handful of such measures.

This argument presupposes, of course, that you agree with the statement, “the University ought to assess the academic potential of candidates, not necessarily their academic achievement.” This is the real bone that the media has to pick, and it isn’t as clear as you might think.

Rightly or wrongly, higher education in Britain is still viewed through an Oxbridge prism. It is the very benchmark by which most schools’ success is measured. This issue is then clear - if schools with a worse average performance are given preferential treatment in Oxbridge admissions, but Oxbridge admissions are used to assess the quality of the very same schools - there is very little in the way of encouraging the improvement of standards in the state sector. This isn’t just a thought experiment - consider the case of TM Landry in Louisiana.

If you are for widening participation measures, then the state school target should not be your guiding star - it says very little about the candidates it represents. If you are against these measures in the first place, believing that Oxbridge is unfairly being made to pick up the slack of the secondary education system, then this shouldn’t bother you at all.