Neve Mumford, Caius JCR Access and Outreach Officer and a first-generation university student, applied to Cambridge last minute, not believing she could get in. “I wasn’t planning on applying to university full stop, let alone Cambridge,” she said.

“Now I’m at university, and my ideas for what I’ll do with my career are far more ambitious,” she said. Neve is a testament to the remarkable power of universities, especially Oxbridge, in driving social mobility. Yet she very nearly didn’t apply.

“Now I’m at university, and my ideas for what I’ll do with my career are far more ambitious”

Cambridge continues to recruit poor numbers of students from underrepresented backgrounds. The University’s most recent Access and Participation Plan (APP) found that students from local areas in the Index of Multiple Deprivation quintiles one and two, students in receipt of Free School Meals and students from Black-British, British-Bangladeshi, and British-Pakistani ethnicities are underrepresented. The APP states that the causes for the underrepresentation are “complex and multifactorial” but lists among them “knowledge and skills […] information and guidance […] misperception of Cambridge […] application success rates […] and limited choice of delivery mode.”

Kaz Rawdanowicz, Robinson College Outreach and Widening Participation Officer told me: “In schools I have gone to so far […] students don’t even think that [Oxbridge] is an option,” highlighting a lack of ambition amongst bright state school pupils. Yet she also felt that, even if they did apply, disadvantaged students lacked the skills to submit high-quality applications. “The learning styles at state schools are quite different – rote learning and a lot of exam-passing,” she said, adding, “The step that is missing, I think, is critical thinking, that additional Cambridge thing, that I do think they have the potential to have, it just hasn’t been harnessed.”

Under-resourced schools leave teachers little time to help students develop these skills. Through programs like the Robinson BME residential, which provides a week of super-curricular and application advice sessions, Kaz hopes her work will provide opportunities for bright pupils to develop their oracy and critical thinking.

James Davies-Warner, Admissions and Outreach Coordinator at Corpus Christi, prioritised developing students’ academic potential rather than encouraging more people to apply. “I personally don’t think that there is a vast untapped reserve of students who are predicted A*AA or A*A*A who don’t come across the idea of Oxford and Cambridge,” he said, though he conceded that “ultimately a good access programme should do both.” James continued: “There is a significant chunk of people from disadvantaged backgrounds who simply don’t stand a chance […] [since they] are unable to put together a competitive application.” While success rates are broadly similar between private and state school applicants, at around 20%, James felt the most disadvantaged students were struggling considerably at the application stage.

“There is a significant chunk of people from disadvantaged backgrounds who simply don’t stand a chance”

James hoped to combat this through Corpus’s Pelican Program, which provides regular online super-curricular sessions for students meeting widening participation criteria, helping to develop their oracy and problem-solving skills.

Elaine Effard, Corpus’s North East Access and Outreach Coordinator, brought up ONS research that found that with disadvantaged students consistently performing worse at A-level than their better-off peers, significant strides in ensuring the students who get the top grades come from diverse backgrounds are needed to ensure that the same can happen for leading universities. But alleviating this problem, Elaine said, meant starting work earlier than the traditional sixth-form focus of access and outreach, where it may be too late to bring students up to the required standard. Through introducing higher education as an ambition for students to work towards, Elaine argued, “They [the students] know that if they work hard for the duration of their secondary education, there are more and more possibilities open to them.”

Beyond encouraging more applications from underrepresented groups and helping them develop academically, a core part of the work access and outreach teams do is to provide a direct connection between schools and the university through the Link Areas scheme, which gives each college a particular region of the country to focus on, getting to know specific schools within that area. James described himself as the “staunchest defender of the link area system,” explaining that “The schools that we should be working with as universities and colleges, they are likely to have staff who are busy […] so we need to make the process of them reaching out for help and advice and guidance as smooth as possible.” By having a reliable, known contact, schools are best able to take advantage of the resources provided by access and outreach teams.

Another important aspect of outreach teams’ work is the individual connections, often based on sharing personal experiences, that they develop with applicants. Keane Handley, the Peterhouse JCR Access and Outreach Officer, felt that the value in having people like him, a student from a deprived background, meet potential applicants was that they could “find someone they can relate to, which makes the place seem more normal and less intimidating.”

“That was the dominant narrative of council estates like Horsely Hill; nobody knew how to get out, they weren’t having education pushed towards them as a destination that was going to help them”

Elaine’s role took this one step further, being based in the North East herself, a particularly underrepresented region. She sought to bridge the geographical and “psychological” distance between students in the North East and Cambridge, aiming to “humanise” the Oxbridge experience by showing students how someone from a similar background to them could achieve the things she had.

Discussions around access are often directed towards increasing the proportion of state school students admitted to Cambridge, which sits at 72.6% of UK applicants, above its 69% target but still disproportionate to the wider population. However, James expressed concern that a focus solely on state school targets as a means of widening access was insufficiently targeting disadvantaged students, saying, “You could take the view […][that] we could easily be at 85% or 90% state when we just take amazing kids from really, really amazing grammar schools […] Are you really changing the demographic there, are you really helping disadvantaged students? I’m not sure.”

As a result, Cambridge has recently decided to suspend its targets for state school admissions, replacing them with targets for students from the most deprived local areas and BAME students. James was supportive of this shift, emphasising the complexity of factors impacting an applicant’s chances of gaining a place. He said: “I think anything that encourages us to try and look at each case individually is to be encouraged.”

A striking sense of moral purpose drove each of the people spoken to, many of whom had experienced first-hand the power of a university education to deliver social mobility. Elaine, who grew up on a deprived council estate in the Northeast seaside town of South Shields, recounted a memorable conversation with a friend of her older brother, who she was teaching at the time, working at her old FE college: “he said, ‘I just want to know how you got out…’ And it made me sad because I knew in that moment that was the dominant narrative of council estates like Horsely Hill; nobody knew how to get out, they weren’t having education pushed towards them as a destination that was going to help them,” she said. Education was, for Elaine, an “escape route” from deprivation. The problem, she felt, was that not enough people who could use it had access to it. Or, as Kaz said, “it [Oxbridge] was never really something they considered.”

Wanting to better engage bright state school students with Oxbridge, Keane had used his position on the JCR to introduce a new Arts Competition, seeing state-educated year 10s and 11s invited to send in a creative response, whether a painting, poem or any other medium, to a given theme. The goal of the competition, for Keane, was “finding a space that you feel comfortable speaking in,” letting students know that, at an institution which often seems elite and distant, there were people who wanted to hear their voices.

Oxbridge admissions remain skewed towards the better-off, though there has been considerable improvement in recent years. Significant efforts are being made to address this, both from the central university – launching and expanding schemes like the foundation year or Apply: Cambridge – and the colleges. There was sentiment that, while lots of work still needed to be done, college outreach was having a significant impact. Neve said, “It’s amazing when you talk to people and by the end of the tour, they’re like, ‘Yeah, I think I want to apply.’”