The Access Project Blog

Salesforce and I have had a falling out. It’s one of those stupid, teenagery arguments – Salesforce has taken the hump over an assumed slight and I honestly don’t know what it was I’m supposed to have done!

We've gone from total harmony...

...to having a bit of a cat fight.

In short: while exploring the finer points of Salesforce, I must have changed a setting or switched something from on to off without realising, and now a reasonably crucial part of the system doesn’t quite work. It’s incredibly frustrating because it was working perfectly before my exploration, so it must be my fault. The vast majority of the things I’ve done have worked out marvellously – I’ve added fields and moved them around, and got things to update automatically and calculate averages and the like, but somewhere along the way I messed with something without realising, and now I’m stuck.

It’s only a minor thing – a tiny glitch in the system – but I’m not quite good enough to sort it out myself. This adds the insult of a bruised ego to the injury of the glitch, and is really rather annoying. I’ve been quite pleased with my progress so far, but this is Salesforce reminding me that, in language terms, I can ask where the swimming pool is or order a baguette, but I’m still some way away from discussing the current political situation or monologging on my favourite philosopher.

I think I’m going to have to just put my tail between my legs and head back to our old, trusty intermediary, Westbrook. I know they’ll be able to fix the problem without breaking a sweat, but I was sort of hoping not to need to go back to them for help until it was something epic. Then they’d know that I needed their help, but still be suitably awed by what I had achieved in the meantime. Clearly, this was always unlikely to happen, but to have to go to them over something this simple is throwing my fantasies of global-Salesforce-domination back in my face.

That said, with any luck Westbrook will explain where I went wrong while they fix it and then Salesforce and I can emerge from this hiccup stronger than before and closer than ever!

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“Blimey, what a… um… lively group!” said a somewhat shell-shocked volunteer at the end of a night of interviewing coaching.  “They were certainly more vocal than we’re used to!” Yes, that’s right, students at Central Foundation had once again exhausted an unsuspecting volunteer with their limitless energy and love of high spirited debate.

Tuesday night saw OxFizz at Central Foundation school leading joint sessions with Year 12 students from Central Foundation and Highbury Grove, focussed on interview skills. This is part of The Access Project’s UCAS & Careers Support strand. Students learnt about the four most common pitfalls of interviews: being too quiet, rambling, fidgeting and overconfidence. Where Highbury Grove students were most concerned about fidgeting and being too quiet, Central Foundation students seemed to have the opposite problem – it turns out they all have confidence issues.  As in, “too much confidence” as an issue.

However, this session really made them re-think things. One student, who in his interview explained his ambition for studying medicine is to find the cure for cancer, confessed afterwards he may need to work on phrasing it a little more carefully next time.  Another realised that in the future he’d need to actually read up about the course before telling his interviewer all about it. One student was somewhat put-off by how much the interviewer would know about the subject – he said he definitely needs to do a bit more learning before going through it again!

The aim of the session was to get students motivated to prepare for their university interviews, and realise what the reality of them will entail.  It certainly did the job – hopefully this will have encouraged students to have a firm knowledge base as well as the sprinkling of confidence required to ace the real thing.

Thanks very much OxFizz!

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Hi, I’m new. I joined The Access Project this week, and will be working here in a brand new role. I’m quite excited about this.

The role is a fairly broad brief to work on improving the Programme for stakeholders: students, tutors and staff in schools. Clearly, we all think TAP is working pretty well at the moment; however, we all believe that the standard of tuition provided to students on the Programme should be in line with the best provided by professional tutors: after all, our tutors are on average brighter, more motivated and have better dress-sense than private tutors. (That last bit might not be quite true.)

This leaves two pretty big questions: why should I come in and do this? And what exactly am I going to be working on?

Well, in answer to the first question, I’m hoping that my experience of developing strategic plans with corporate and PE houses from my current job at PwC Strategy will be of use. I also have 2 years’ of teaching experience in the not-so-distant past with Teach First, which should help me to make sensible decisions about priorities for us to work on.

In terms of what I’ll be working on, I can give half an answer at the moment. There are clearly some things which just need improving as soon as possible – for example, updating the content that we provide to tutors is a pretty big job that we’ll spend a lot of time on over the summer. And then there is a long list of things which we feel could be better, but which might not have an obvious solution right now: like how we can interact best with classroom teachers in the future. On those questions, my role for now is to speak to as many people as possible to work out what the issues are, and then work with everyone at TAP to come up with a sensible way forward.

So, if you’re involved with the Programme, you will hopefully hear from me soon.

Andrew

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I am in charge of Data and Impact for The Access Project. This is a catch-all term for gathering information – deciding what to collect and why, how best to collect and store it, and how to show it off (both to ourselves and to anyone else who might be interested). It is, alas, a topic that, when I bring it up a cocktail parties, makes most people invent reasons to suddenly be elsewhere.

You may ask why I feel it necessary to bring it up at cocktails parties and the answer is this: Salesforce!

The Access Project has, just this week, taken ownership of our own shiny, new, expertly crafted Salesforce platform. It has taken our IT consultants – the marvellous Westbrook – some three months to fashion, and on Monday we unveiled it in all its data-and-impacty glory.

Not only does it store information on everyone we work with, but it tracks all the tutorials: the students and their academic data; the tutors and how they feel about The Access Project; the teachers and what improvements they’re seeing in the classroom. It even does charts and graphs.

This is the feature that has me most excited. I am, and have been for a while now, all about charts and graphs.

Chart showing percentage of TAP students by status

This is only a very basic chart that took mere seconds to throw together, but it (and hundreds like it!) have changed the way we at The Access Project view The Access Project.

It shows what percentage of our current students are at what stage in the programme. So, 10% are in the process of being matched with a tutor, but 30% are only one stage behind, and they’ll need tutors soon. This helps us plan ahead and see when we’ll need to recruit more tutors. We’ve also got only a relatively small number who are at the very beginning of the process and this might be a problem, were it not for the fact that we’re not in the run up to exams and everyone needs to be knuckling down to their revision.

This is, as charts go, an extremely simple one. If you – like me – can see where we could go with all of this, then check back later for regular updates on my progress navigating the landscape of Data and Impact, accompanied only by my new trusty sidekick, Salesforce.

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I meet Lawrence in a branch of Leon around the corner from my office. I order a cup of tea; nothing for him. It’s 6pm on a Monday and we must look like a strange pairing to the scattered customers and lone server behind the counter. I’m a 35 year old white City worker in a suit and tie and he’s a black teenager with a smile and a decent size afro, wearing jeans and trainers.

We’ve been introduced by The Access Project, a charity set up by Alex Kelly, a young Oxford-educated schoolteacher in Islington who concluded that the reason the kids in his school weren’t getting into good universities wasn’t because they are not clever enough, or because the universities don’t make enough of an effort to recruit them, but because they don’t get good enough grades. His solution? Get some amateur tutors to help the kids with further understanding their subjects and also exam technique. So far, so obvious, but Alex’s real stroke of genius comes next. Having been at Oxford, he knows dozens of people like me: smart graduates who are now professionals working in London and reckon they’ve still got enough of the ol’ exam hall magic to teach their degree subject to A-level students.  The best bit of Alex’s idea is to have the students travel to the tutors’ place of work so all I have to do is skive off the desk for an hour a week to do a tutorial rather than having to schlep halfway across London.  It’s very efficient for the tutors which is why I’m involved.

This is going to be fun. I take a sip of tea and ask Lawrence what he wants to study. “Physics at Manchester” comes the reply.  Great. “Who is Manchester University’s most famous physicist?” I ask, thinking of Ernest Rutherford, the Nobel Prize-winning father of nuclear physics, widely credited with splitting the atom, the man who basically invented the proton and for whom the 104^th chemical element is named. Rutherford is buried in Westminster Abbey, not far from Sir Issac Newton.  “Brian Cox” comes the reply, quick as a flash. There is clearly a generational gap here.

We move on to grades.  A clutch of respectable, if not spectacular, GCSEs and some pretty worrying AS-level grades: a D in physics and C in Chemistry.  I explain that Manchester is one of the best places to study physics in the country and that he’ll need to get three As at least, probably an A* in physics. He counters with a ‘foundation course’, a one-year pre-undergraduate course run by the university for applicants from non-conventional backgrounds. Apparently he can get on that with a mixture of Bs and Cs.  I’ve already learned something today.

We arrange the first tutorial for later that week and I ride my bike home, lost in thought and already worrying. Lawrence is in the second year of the sixth form.  It’s October and he wants to retake one chemistry and one physics module in January, as well as the scheduled modules. He got an E in the last Chemistry module, so we need to get him from an E to a B in four months, as well as doing the current module and getting a B in that too. On top of that, he still needs to do physics and maths.  He’s going to have to work very hard.

I’m going to have to work very hard.  The next day I read the syllabus and look at some past papers, all of which I’ve downloaded from the Access Project’s website.  It turns out that I left much of the ol’ exam hall magic in the exam hall.  I signed up for this without really checking if I could remember much and now my wife struggles to conceal her glee at my predicament: I’ve over-reached and now if Lawrence doesn’t get the grades to go to Manchester it’s somehow the fault of me and my big ego.  Luckily I injure my back and need to rest it so I ditch the bike in favour of commuting by train, gaining an hour a day of quality textbook time. I need it.

The tutorials progress. Lawrence’s mind is a mess.  He’s never made a revision sheet and has no experience in organising his thoughts. I understand why Alex set up the Access Project. Lawrence is smart, he’s just not really been pushed and no-one’s taught him how to learn, or how to approach an exam, or raised his standards to a level a bit above his ability. I focus on revision sheets and getting Lawrence to become more intellectually rigorous. This has the happy side-effect of buying me a couple of extra weeks to read the textbook. It’s starting to come back.

Meanwhile, an unexpected development. I’m the boss in a tight-knit team who tend to work late and so I need to explain where I’m going at 6pm on a Tuesday evening when everyone else is still working. Clearly I’ve hired people who rate their academic ability as much as I do: within a few weeks one of my team-members is teaching physics to a girl in the lower sixth and another is teaching GCSE maths. We compare notes and trade advice on lesson plans. In the quiet run up to Christmas everyone on the floor who passes by has a go at a few GCSE maths questions. Another piece of genius in Alex’s plan: I can see how something like this can spread like wildfire through a workplace or a group of old university friends. One person starts tutorials and then a few others think ‘if they can do it then I fancy my chances at being able to teach X or Y’ and it snowballs from there, pretty soon everyone is doing tutorials and the receptionists at the front desk start wondering if this building is still a bank or has turned into a sixth form college.

Lawrence makes progress with the chemistry and we develop a routine. We spend a session going over a topic then he does some homework questions, writes a revision sheet and reads ahead about the next topic. However his homework answers still lack rigour and he’s dropping marks because he hasn’t thought the question through or lost concentration or simply just not tried hard enough. His understanding of the subject is much better, helped by the fact that I’m now back in the groove so my explanations are clearer and more concise. We switch the focus back to exam technique and I time him doing questions while I watch. His technique improves at the expense of our evenings: tutorials stretch from 1 hour to 2 ½ hours.

My bank announces a round of redundancies. For the first time in my life I’m not scared about getting shit-canned.  I kind of like the idea of becoming a chemistry teacher, it’s just that the pay in banking is much, much better.  In my mind’s eye I gloss over the huge difference between teaching one smart child on a one-to-one basis and trying to keep the attention of thirty students sat in a room stocked to the ceiling with bottles of acid, fire, breakable glass stuff and taps with rubber hoses.  I survive the layoffs and go back to banking by day and teaching by night.  Realistically both I and the schoolchildren of London are probably better off under this arrangement.

Exam-time approaches. I set Lawrence a timed past paper for homework. He comes in the following week and I ask him how it went. He says he can’t remember how long it took him to do it and when we look at the paper together he’s missed entire questions, only answering 70% of the available marks. What he did answer was actually pretty good but it is two days before the first exam and I freak out. I tell him if he pulls a stunt like that in the exam he’s not going to university, period. I tell him that most of what I value in my life now came as a direct result of going to university: my home, my circle of close friends, my job. I even met my wife there. My daughters owe their very existence to my A-level grades. It is possible I over-egged this speech a bit, but I wanted to make my point.

I calm down and send him a good luck email the day before the exam with a more encouraging tone. He knows enough to get a B provided he answers all the questions, I just hope he doesn’t do anything dumb. He replies after the exam saying he answered every question and thinks it went well. I am happy.

This is where we are now but it is not the end of the story. He doesn’t have his results yet and he still needs to sit the final modules in June. If he gets the grades to do the foundation course at Manchester he should be OK for that year but once he gets onto the actual physics undergraduate course he’ll be one of the least qualified there, up against smarter students from better schools with 3 or 4 A grades.  He’ll have to work twice as hard as them just to keep up.

If I’m honest I’ve written this now because I’m scared he won’t even get the grades and this story only really works if it has a happy ending.  However, thanks to Alex and everyone else at the Access Project, Lawrence has a realistic shot at being the first person in his family to go to university. And not some crappy poly to do Pointless Studies either: physics at Manchester University, the home of Ernest Rutherford, and Brian Cox. But he’s still going to need to work for it. I’ve given him a week off tutorials after his exams but we start again the following week for the final module. My back is better and I ride my bike home smiling. I have some lessons to plan.

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The Paris marathon is this Sunday. And I’m running in it. The scariest thing is that at the end of mile 23, I’ll still have 3.2 miles to go. I reckon in terms of preparation I’m not doing badly relative to the rest of The Access Project’s team. Chris has a stress fracture and is strictly not allowed to run. Last week he sent us all an x-ray of his over-trained ankle. There were bits of solid white that clearly weren’t where they’re supposed to be.

Oualid and Nicky picked up classic runners’ injuries a few months ago and have only been clear to take part for the last month. My dad is in a state – after a spate of injuries (most likely age-related) he can just about run for half an hour, and his friends have unsuccessfully pleaded with him to be sensible and pull out. So my shin splints – which put me out for a couple of weeks – are hardly worth mentioning.

But they sure were annoying. When you have an injury it’s as if your body is being disloyal to the rest of you, and you kind of hate it. And as you hobble along the street to and from work, you look at people nonchalantly strolling past you in disbelief – can’t they feel the pain too? It’s hard to imagine not being injured. I’m back on the road now. Last week I did my first (short) session on the road for a month and the next day felt no ill effects – so I’ve forgiven my body. One thing about running a marathon which I didn’t know previously is the need to rest in advance – for the last few days there is really no running at all. It seems weird as (please stop reading any Access Project students) before big deadlines like exams I’m used to cramming until the last minute. There’s none of that now. I’ll find out soon if my preparation has been enough or not enough. For now I’m just waiting… and checking our fundraising page every couple of hours. £21,505 so far! Thank you everyone. With this much raised at mile 23 the marathon will be a doddle.

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On Friday, I took a group of students to the Royal Veterinary College to dissect rabbits. Having never studied Biology, even at school, the whole dissection experience was new ground for me, and I must admit to feeling some trepidation as we entered the room and I saw the rows of dissection tables, each with a sad-looking rabbit stretched out on it waiting to be opened up!

The students, who have all been regular attendees at our MedSoc workshop for budding doctors, were in general less squeamish than me, although the smell of the rabbits’ insides did lead to quite a few amusing facial expressions as they got, em, stuck in (for want of a better expression)…

Working in small groups, it was interesting to see the different ways they approached their task. They were given an actual workbook that first-year Vet students would use to carry out their own dissection, and apart from an introductory safety talk from the senior technician, Andrew Crook, they were left to their own devices. The technicians wandered round each group, pointing out interesting pieces of anatomy and answering questions, but what the students did with each rabbit was left up to them, which was a great introduction for them to the kind of independent learning that they’ll do at university. One group had opened up their rabbit and laid most of its internal organs on the table before another group had even finished skinning theirs!

The staff were absolutely brilliant, responding to most questions with hints to help the students figure out the answers for themselves, and really drawing out the students’ existing knowledge to help them understand the anatomy in front of them. At one point James managed to get the group to understand why rabbits eat their own poo, entirely by asking them questions about things they already knew (it’s something to do with the cell structure of grass having to pass through the digestive system more than once to break down entirely. Not that I already knew any of that, but the students did!). The students took away a more detailed understanding of animal anatomy and digestive functions (I hope), and had a really great experience of university facilities and teaching styles.

Unfortunately I got home to find my boyfriend had visited the farmer’s market and bought a rabbit for dinner. It is going to live in the freezer until I have forgotten everything I learned about rabbits on Friday…

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It was an interesting week last week for news stories about postgraduate funding. Mica Ertegun, whose late husband was co-founder of Atlantic records, has just established a scholarship programme that will fund 15 students a year to study postgraduate degrees in Art and Humanities at Oxford University. And as though trying to get in on the act, the government also announced it will review postgraduate funding (which barely got a mention in the Browne report or any of the subsequent furore over fees).

About time too, I’d say! Astonishingly, at the moment, universities aren’t even obliged to monitor the backgrounds of their postgraduate students, so nobody really knows whether there is a noticeable class divide among people doing graduate degrees. I am willing to hazard a guess that there is, and that it’s considerably worse than the class divide that sees thirty per cent of Oxbridge students come from private schools.

At the moment, if you want to do a post grad course, and you want to have some help with fees and living costs, you have to apply for a scholarship from a research council. These scholarships are massively over-subscribed: last year’s AHRC figures show that only one in five applications for PhD funding was successful. That’s a lot of well-qualified rejects – and if you come from a wealthy background, you may be able to say, ‘well, I’d have liked the funding, but I’m going to do it anyway.’ I know from personal experience that university departments rely on and actively try to recruit self-funded doctoral students. Even at £3k a year, these fees mean that only those from privileged backgrounds could afford this option. If you were less well-off, you might just be able to manage to do the degree part-time, while working to support yourself and cover the fees. At £9k a year, this will be out of the reach of all but the very rich.

This is a total waste of talent, apart from the clear social inequality of the situation. Given how popular post-grad qualifications (especially Masters degrees) have become, it is vital to establish a comprehensive system of funding that allows all those with the ability to do well in post-graduate education the chance to enter it. The student loan system should be extended so that all those who achieve a First or a high 2.1 should be eligible for funding to cover postgraduate fees and living costs. It is time we started talking about widening participation in postgraduate education, and a fair and sensible funding system is the first step towards making this happen.

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Is this offensive to your religion?

In honour of the season, last week’s motion in the Senior Debating club was ‘This house believes that Valentine’s Day is a cheap ploy to sell tacky goods.’ My students have a noticeable tendency to come up with a point that shows how the motion – any motion – is offensive to someone’s religion. I had thought this motion would make them think outside the box. However, the first argument put forward by the proposition was that St Valentine was a lecherous old child abuser and that therefore celebrating him was both morally wrong and – you’ve guessed it – offensive to religious people.

However, once they’d moved on from this slightly shaky argument, both teams came up with some great points. We heard that Valentine’s Day was likely to increase suicides among lonely people, countered by the proposition’s point that it was good to have a day to celebrate love, and anyway, lonely people could always go speed-dating. We heard that love should be celebrated every day, not just on February 14th, that Valentine’s Day is good for the economy, and that the relentless focus on hearts and pink teddy bears infantilises women (OK, I admit I sort of fed them that last point).

Perhaps surprisingly, given that they had the harder task, the opposition won! Their logical defence of the tradition on the basis that it was a bit of harmless fun, good economic sense, and a positive celebration of love in all its forms, left Valentine’s Day safe for another year…

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The monster of Dorrie's nightmares

In about week 2 of my arrival at The Access Project I (somewhat rashly) agreed to take a group of students on a trip over half term.  As the date grows ever nearer, the dreaded term “RISK ASSESSMENT” has reared its ugly head, and I am faced with my most major test yet.

The document I have to fill in is 26 pages long, and it’s designed to make you think of the worst that could possibly ever happen to you and your students on the trip.  And whilst this is probably a good idea, it is an unbelievably depressing document to fill out.

What WILL I do if one of my students falls under a bus whilst crossing the road?  What on earth can I do if someone falls off a cliff?!  And my trip isn’t even a high risk one – it’s only a day trip to a university campus.  Heaven help me if I actually try to do anything more complicated with the students involving (cue: sharp intake of breath) an overnight stay!  The risks involved in that are just too overwhelming to think about.  Oh dear.  I think it’s time for a calming cup of tea.

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At a time when ‘A’ grade A-levels are increasingly common, the recent government reforms to higher education – allowing universities to take on an unlimited number of students who achieve AAB grades or higher – are having interesting effects on university recruitment. According to Peter Scott in the Guardian this week, universities are “sifting the wheat – students with AAB grades at A-Level – from the chaff – those who missed their grades or never had the opportunities and resources to aspire so high in the first place”. As part of the changes,  some universities are refocusing their recruitment strategies to target AAB students by offering sizeable financial incentives to the top applicants.

Take, for example, the ‘excellence’ scholarship at the University of Kent and the Chancellor’s scholarship at the University of Leicester, which both offer £2,000 for each year of study to students who make them their firm choice and go on to achieve AAA at A-level, regardless of family income.

Scott has an ethical objection to this. Whilst, in itself, there is nothing wrong with universities offering financial incentives to high performing applicants, offering 17 year olds thousands of pounds as reward for choosing a particular university, only to take it away if they miss their target grades is not only dubious, as Scott argues, but also is a real distraction for disadvantaged applications who may already have financial worries on their mind when choosing which universities to apply to.

At the core of The Access Project’s tutoring system is the belief that raising academic achievement amongst disadvantaged young people, rather than aspiration alone, is the key to widening participation in the UK’s top universities. Many of our students will be in that ‘AAB’ category with a wide range of university courses available to them. The real difficulty with bursaries like the ones above is that they divert attention away from the message that finance is not a barrier to accessing higher education – no fees are paid up front and you don’t pay a penny back until you’re earning over £21,000 – at a time when young people are more concerned than ever before about the financial commitments of higher education. What’s really worrying is the idea that an applicant with top grades might choose a university because the short-term financial rewards its offers rather the quality of the course or the university itself.

It is true; ‘A’ grade A-levels are becoming a common commodity but this is the message we want our students to take away: Don’t sell yourself short and don’t get short changed.

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Shona coaching the TAP runners

This Sunday I’ll be running the Watford Half Marathon, along with some of TAP’s marathon team. What with Crispin getting injured about 2 weeks in to a training schedule I suggested, I’m loath to push the remaining runners too hard! Still, I know Alex and Nick are both aiming for fairly ambitious times in Paris, so I’ve given them target paces for this weekend that would set them up nicely for the longer run. Alex wants to run the marathon in under 3 hours, and Nick is aiming for three and a half. With the big race only 10 weeks away, if they want to achieve those targets, they should be able to run a half in 1.25 and 1.35 respectively.

I’ve given them some standard tips – ease down on the training this week, eat lots of carbs on Saturday, and don’t have too much booze beforehand (afterwards is a different matter!). And on the day I’ll be stressing that they shouldn’t go off too fast. I suspect Alex might set off like Usain Bolt and suffer for it a few miles in. Actually, I’m sort of hoping he does do that, firstly because it would be quite funny to watch, and secondly because it will teach him the importance of a measured start before he runs the marathon! A couple of years ago I made a similar mistake in the London marathon. I did my first 5k in pretty much my 5k PB time, and then by mile 8 was starting to die a slow painful death. And I still had 18 miles to go! It was really unpleasant, and my time in the end was fairly embarrassing. A half marathon at this stage in the training is a good opportunity to practice racing strategy and learn how to pace your running steadily. And if you do make any mistakes, at least you only have to stagger round 13 miles rather than 26!

I’ve run Watford before, and it is a really nice course with lots of rural roads and quite a few hills! Most importantly, tea and biscuits are available at the finish. Watch this space to see how we all get on…

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The end of school draws nigh and I heave a sigh of relief – it has well and truly been a manic day.

The boys argue as passionately as these guys, but they're rarely dressed quite as smartly!

Kids have been accosting me in corridors to find out more about the Project, and students have been lining up outside my office to sign up for tutors.  This morning I ran a workshop on media and current affairs, and I have just finished policing an extremely lively debate club full of 20 very bright, very vocal boys.

I think it’s safe to say that the Project is really starting to kick-off. Over 35 Year 10 students have signed up to take part, 23 Year 12s are on the books as potential tutees and 13 Year 11 students are about to be matched up with tutors (with plenty more banging on the door to get in on the action too – these are the ones that have been lining up outside my door!).

Add to that an important Progress meeting first thing, and it’s safe to say that it’s been totally action-packed.

So when I say a manic day, I actually mean a super-awesome day. Being a Programme Manager is immensely rewarding and it’s brilliant to be starting to get to know the students better. They are a really lively; an interested and interesting group.

But I have to admit, I am looking forward to going home, putting the kettle on and getting some peace and quiet!

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For someone who quit caffeine earlier this month, I drank a lot of coffee last weekend. On Saturday I met a retired secondary school headteacher who I was asking to join our advisory board, and with the help of two blow-your-head-off filter coffees it took us just 45 minutes to put the education system back on track. Still shaking slightly, on Sunday morning I met a retired derivatives trader (I think he’s around 30, by the way), and had a flat white and then an expresso while we discussed his plan to research how state school students perform in their undergraduate degrees compared to independent school students. With the plan sorted, I chased the other coffees with a latte while chatting to one of The Access Project’s trustees on the phone, and was still nursing the dregs when I was joined by an economics graduate who wants to run a series of 6 weekly after-school economics workshops in a gap he has between two jobs. When I got home (I know this is weird) I ate some instant coffee granules. Then I watched giant snails come out of the wall, and lay on my bed unable to sleep. Today I’m on hot milk.

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It was encouraging to see research published today on how summer schools can help students get into top universities (and not just because I’m about to write a funding application to finance a TAP summer school, and am actively seeking evidence of their impact!). 76% of children who gain entry to a summer school then go on to an elite university, and the Sutton Trust’s summer school scheme is set to expand this year, putting new partnerships in place with Imperial, UCL, and Durham. I will certainly be encouraging our students to apply for these, but I do wonder how much of the success of the students this report looked at is down to the intervention of the summer school, and how much of it is to do with the fact that those who are performing well already are more likely to go to the summer school. With 7 applications for every Sutton Trust place, the universities can afford to be almost as picky with who gets into a summer school as they are about A-level results!

The Sutton Trust has previously calculated that around 3000 students each year get the grades to go to an elite university, but go instead to a less prestigious institution – these are sometimes known as ‘most able, least likely’, and it certainly seems that the summer schools have an impressive success rate in reaching out to students from this group. Why are they so much more successful than, for example, open days on campus or HE fairs in schools? It is probably common sense that immersion in campus life over several days will have more of an effect than a fleeting visit, but I don’t think their success is purely down to this more intensive approach. Summer schools involve the students actually doing academic work, and experiencing a university learning environment. Attending lectures and seminars, and actively participating in them, is about more than just aspiration-raising: it gives the student a preview of what university-style learning and teaching methods, and should hopefully also teach them something tangible about their chosen subject. Highly-able students from all sorts of backgrounds respond to that with the same enthusiasm and excitement that any fresher would.

This is a lesson that universities could apply to their other types of outreach work too. I’m currently planning some campus trips for our students so have been researching the different activities on offer at different universities. Time and again I see the same menu of options – talks on student life, on personal statements, on how the application system works. While it is great for school pupils to hear about this stuff from current undergrads, I can’t help thinking that they could get all this information without actually leaving school premises! If we’re going to go all the way to a university campus, I want the pupils to be able to experience some actual learning while they’re there – all universities should be building into their outreach days some taster classes, whether it’s a lecture, mini group project, or seminar. Giving students an actual experience of what it’s like to be taught in a university is far more beneficial to them than offering advice they can get from a multitude of other sources. Note to WP departments everywhere: spread the summer school effect more widely, please!

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After the Christmas break we’re back in the swing of things, only now we’re a little bit more organized and grown up.

2B or not 2B?

Shona is now an autonomous agent running the Project at Highbury Grove. She’s playing a benign Akhmad Kadyrov to my Vladimir Putin. So I’ve stepped back entirely from running weekly workshops like debating and creative writing, and Shona is doing it all on her own.

And Dorrie is settling in very well to her new role running the Project at Central Foundation Boys’ School. She keeps sending me positive messages, like, ‘Just wanted to let you know that I have met my first Year 13 student, and we had a great chat. It also sounds like he has had a great experiences with his tutor so far, so we could definitely think about a second tutor for him.’ Thinking about expanding into our first new school prior to the event, I never expected things to go this smoothly – so I’m left twiddling my thumbs back at TAP headquarters.

Well, not quite, because I’m now turning my attention to deciding which three schools and corporate partners we want to start working with in September. This means lots of cycling across London from meeting to meeting. On my travels I’m accumulating an impressive collection of corporate-branded stationery. If anyone needs an industrial supply of propelling pencils branded with the logos of leading legal, strategy consulting and banking firms, I’m your man.

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Coming in to the staff room on my first day at school, I picked a seat and got cracking with introducing myself to the teachers around me. It was only after about five minutes that I realised I had disturbed the natural order of things and that the teachers were looking a bit confused - I had stolen someone’s chair! Oh dear…

Today was my first full day in school, and it was really exciting to see everything in action. I have met so many members of staff that my head is awhirl with names, job roles, and faces. It’s going to take a while to get it all straight in my head, and I haven’t even started with the students yet! Some of the teachers have tried to give me tips on remembering it all, but I have a feeling that they’ve honed their brains over many years in the classroom.  Sadly I am some way off that! Still, it’s always something to aspire to.

How funny that I have only been part of The Access Project for a week, it seems much longer (in a good way of course!). Last Wednesday when I showed up at the office, I knew next to nothing about The Access Project or Central Foundation Boys’ School. Just look at me now… after five days of induction, watching Shona run the show in Highbury Grove, and speaking to anyone who’d give me the time of day (which, as it turns out, is most people – they are a very friendly bunch), I have finally been let loose on the school to get started with the Project. How exciting!

All being well, I will launch the programme next week for Year 12s, which will involve me speaking in their assembly.  Apparently they can be “a bit of a rowdy group, but as long as you’re an engaging speaker you’ll be fine”.  Guess that’s the next challenge then… but you know what I say?  Bring it on!

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My first lesson with Obaid was a nightmare of organisation, seeing as there are three Starbucks cafés in Angel. Once we managed to be in the same one, however, he turned out to be the nicest boy I had ever met, as well as not too bad at plotting polynomials of degree 3, though he needed a fair amount of guidance.

The author, but not while tutoring.

Obaid didn’t do well in his AS levels last year, and decided to retake them. At the start of our next lesson he announced that he had resolved to work really hard, and he had gone through all the exercises in our chapter. As the weeks went on I could feel that he was getting a lot more confident with the maths, rather than simply learning it.

When you see someone every week, you really do get to know them, and them you – my tutee last year, Matthew, suggested we move a lesson to 12pm “because I know you don’t like getting up in the morning miss”. Well, getting to know people like Obaid is one of my favourite things about tutoring for TAP, and it’s enough to make you look forward to Wednesday afternoons.

The very best bit about the whole thing, however, is when you feel you’ve made a difference somewhere. Recently in a lesson, Obaid was going through a past paper with no need for my help apart from an occasional glance. “I can see you’re bored miss”, he said, and he looked pretty pleased with himself.

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Yesterday afternoon Highbury Grove School was buzzing with various different events, all of them involving large numbers of visitors! Downstairs in the hall, various primary schools were coming together for a Christmas Carol Concert, and up on the top floor we had 30 volunteers from Bain and Company come in for the afternoon to offer one-to-one careers advice to our Year 12 students. There was an atmosphere of controlled chaos as we took over 3 rooms, each room hosting two different workshop stations which the students had to move around in groups.

We had provided the volunteers with background information and activities to get the students thinking, and the various topics included how to write a great CV, what to include in a UCAS personal statement, choosing a course and university, careers with different types of degrees, and student finance.

After some initial confusion, especially during the first station changeover, everyone got into the swing of the sessions, and it was great to wander round the rooms and see every single student in a group of 30 engaged in deep conversation with the volunteers. And while I think the educational activities were useful, perhaps even more important is the experience it gave the students of connecting with a world of graduate professionals who can offer some of their own life experience.

Most of our students have no family history of higher education and so lack the contacts that middle class teenagers take for granted. It is truly valuable I think for students at this key stage in their life, with so many important choices ahead of them, to be able to talk to a range of people about possible paths into the professions. Possibly my favourite sight of the afternoon was when, at each changeover, a room full of inner-city pupils enthusiastically shook hands with their volunteers a chorus of “nice to meet you” sounded from all sides. It provided a pleasingly warm and fuzzy end to term for all involved!

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According to the OECD, income inequality among working-age people has risen faster in Britain than in any other rich nation since the mid-1970s.

The annual average income in the UK of the top 10% in 2008 was just under £55,000, about 12 times higher than that of the bottom 10%, who had an average income of £4,700.

This is up from a ratio of eight to one in 1985 and significantly higher than the average income gap in other developed nations, where it is nine to one.

I find it troubling that inequality of pay is rising – as a believer in the human race I like to think that over time we make progress.

And as a patriot it’s embarrassing that inequality of pay is rising faster in the UK than in other rich nations.

I would like to think that before anything else I’m a libertarian. It shouldn’t matter to me that people’s incomes are very different: this is a free country and people need to have the chance to succeed as well as the chance to fail.

However it is horribly obvious that the libertarian position doesn’t stand to reason. This isn’t a free country.

Having taught in an inner city school for five years, and now running a charity to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds win places at top universities, what’s been staring me in the face since stepping out of the home counties and in to the classroom is this: worse than inequality of pay, inequality of health, inequality of aptitude, worse than any other kind of inequality, is the appalling inequality of opportunity in this country.

Just over half the Access Project students speak English as a second language. Only a very few of their parents have been to university. On the flip-side, these students’ independently schooled peers are brought up by parents articulate in English, who have been extensively educated themselves.

Our students are at an impressive disadvantage before they get to school age, but while our students do their learning in classes of 29 or 30 full of students from exactly the same background (their schools are comprehensive only in name), the independently schooled do their lessons in classes of 15, full of students exactly like themselves. The end of the school day for our students is at 3pm. For the independently schooled it is 4.30 or 5pm. Our students go home to play on computer games. The independently schooled go home to a private tutor in an academic subject or a violin.

Many of our students struggle to gain a ‘C’ grade at English GCSE, which is the national target. But - speaking as an ex English teacher – you barely need to be literate to get a ‘C’ grade at English GCSE. On the other hand, as the headteacher of Eton once put it, his students pick up GCSEs like boy scouts picking up badges. The bar is so low that many independent schools have abandoned GCSEs all-together.

I believe that inequality of pay is sustainable only as long as it is the case that with hard work and aptitude, anyone could earn the top levels of pay. I’m not at all convinced that this is the case in the UK. One’s level of education, and therefore one’s life-possibilities, is ordained at birth.

I’d like to be a libertarian but we can’t let the disparities in our society continue to grow. Inequality of pay is growing, and so is the much more dangerous inequality of opportunity. Over the summer we witnessed the complete breakdown of law and order in the UK’s major cities, and many commentators are warning that a repeat of these riots is inevitable. We have to act to fix the inequalities that feed resentment and violence: the writing is on the wall.

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I have mixed feeling about today’s news that a fifth of universities are applying for a last-minute reduction in their fees. Obviously I welcome the fact that this will mean many students will be leaving university in summer, 2014, with thousands of pounds less debt than they would have done. But at the same time, today’s announcement is the result of wrangling between the government and the university boards of management, and it leaves me wondering who’s listening to the students in all this? Considering that ‘students at the heart of the system’ was the rather nebulous promise of the White Paper that started this all off, neither the government nor the universities seem to be particularly concerned the fact that tens of thousands of students have already submitted their UCAS application, and now the goalposts are being moved around them. Again.

This year’s cohort, if they thought about university in their early teenage years, would have been perfectly reasonable in assuming that they would be applying and attending university under a system that charged them around £3000 a year. This changed dramatically with the publication of the Browne review in 2010, and in the fifteen months since then we’ve been treated to a steady stream of universities announcing that they’d be charging the maximum £9000 a year. After some desperate efforts from certain coalition politicians, we now seem to be witnessing a partial reversal of this pattern.

None of this is fair on the applicants themselves. The UCAS process is enough of a gamble as it is, given students are applying without certain knowledge of what grades they’ll achieve: it is unfair and unrealistic to expect them to negotiate the process without having the full range of fee information in front of them. Whatever the politicians and the universities ultimately decide about fee levels, the most important things is that the decisions are transparent and easily understood by university applicants and their families. Chopping and changing in the middle of play just heaps confusion onto an already confusing process.

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Yesterday I met with Charlie, Head of Year 10 and a PE teacher at The Canon’s High School in Queensbury – which is at the northern end of the Jubilee Line. She approached us after seeing the Telegraph piece, saying that her school was interested in running The Access Project.

Alex was worried that he was going to have to fight his way through herds of these to reach the school, but we assured him that it was not that far north.

As a teacher and now running the Project I’ve always been working in inner-city London. It’s been 6 years now, and I’m embarrassed to say that this was the furthest out of the centre I’ve ever ventured! Queensbury is full of low-rise semi-detached 1950s houses with car parking spaces and leafy roundabouts. It’s a different world from what I’ve been used to and I felt a little disorientated making my way from the tube station to the school. At the school, most of the students are from families of Indian and Pakistani origin – again something new for me – there was not a single student from this descent at Highbury Grove in the years I taught there. Kevin, a Deputy Head at the Canon’s High School, was also at our meeting, and when I asked about which firms they are already in contact with who he thought might like to sponsor The Access Project at the school, he explained that the school does not have any partnerships with corporates. Again, a culture-shock: visit a school in Tower Hamlets and typically they will have long-standing relationships with several blue-chip firms whose offices are in their back yard.

However, our meeting proved that the key characteristics that make The Access Project useful are present at Canon’s High School: motivated but disadvantaged students (roughly 40% of the students are on Free School Meals), a committed and dynamic teaching staff, and university access that could be improved. Currently students at the school have excellent university access – most leave the school to go on to Higher Education – but this is mostly to local universities rather than institutions in the Russell Group. The school is ambitious to change this and, as far as, I’m concerned, it would be great to expand The Access Project into a school which is so different from the ones we work in at the moment. We want to keep piloting the Project in different environments, so that when we are ready to scale, we will have a wide range of experiences and expertise to draw upon.

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From left to right: Martha Mackenzie, OUSU President; Alex Kelly; James Freeland, treasurer of the Oxford Union Standing Committee and chair of the panel; Linda Jones, Partner, Pinsent Masons; Jonathan Bond, Director of HR and Learning, Pinsent Masons.

On Tuesday evening I was part of a panel discussion put together by the Oxford Union to examine how to get more students from disadvantaged backgrounds winning places at Oxford and Cambridge.

I was the first to speak, and my opening gambit ruffled a few feathers among the audience and other members of the panel. I inadvertently caused a bit of a furore when I said that the way to improve access to top universities is not to focus on raising aspiration, but to focus on raising attainment. I said that universities doing Open Days, and law firms giving work experience, was more or less useless unless these efforts are accompanied by focused, long term intervention to help students from lower socio-economic backgrounds get better grades.

To my right was the president of the Oxford University Student Union, who organises a lot of Open Days, and to my left was a partner from a law firm, who is in charge of the firm’s work experience. We had a heated but thoroughly productive discussion about the way various different issues interact to place barriers in the way of disadvanataged students achieving their full potential. But by the end of it I felt that I had won over most of the audience, who agreed with me that the achievement gap is more intractable than the aspiration gap, and that corporates and universities need to get real and address the more difficult problem head on.

Alex and Martha in a heated discussion

Full marks to The Access Project’s partners – firms like Booz and Company – who are doing just this. Their employees are signing up to become one-to-one tutors in their dozens. They start tutoring students for an hour a week when the students are only 14, and they stay working with them until the students are 18. Not some flash-in-the-pan, feel-good sound-bite! This is meaningful intervention!

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I’ve just finished my first full week as the Programme Manager at Highbury Grove School. It has been exhausting but fun! The main task I’ve had this week has been to match all the students up with their tutors. My lovely colleague Deborah had organised the pairings in advance, but this week I’ve had to meet with all the students to make sure they understand we expect them to work really hard in the tutorials and to check what textbooks they’re using so we can order those for their tutors. Then I’m emailing students and tutors to introduce them to each other and get them going.

I am meeting lots of students for the first time in these meetings, so it’s been great fun getting to know who everyone is and asking them what their hopes are for the future. It’s been really inspiring seeing how motivated many of them are to do well, and I am excited to be part of a project which hopefully will be helping them on their way! I know the tutors are all raring to go too, so hopefully this half-term break will see lots of tutorials getting underway in offices and coffee shops all over London!

The other big thing on my desk this week has been UCAS applications: our final year students are sending their applications off, which makes for a slightly frantic atmosphere in school as they make the final tweaks to their personal statements and the teachers rush around writing references for everyone. I’ve been helping many of our students edit their personal statements and in a lot of cases I’ve been really moved by how much they’ve achieved already, sometimes in very difficult circumstances. I think am going to be as nervous as they are come results day. But that’s a long way away yet – there’s a whole school year to get through first!

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After a summer of hard work developing tutoring materials and infrastructure, we are getting back to what we do best: working with kids to help them achieve their potential. We’re resuming our work at Highbury Grove School next week (our next blog will tell you all about how that’s going) but I am also really looking forward to starting The Access Project at Central Foundation Boys’ School.

We’re doing some work supporting their Year 13 students with their UCAS applications at the moment, but we’ll be launching properly in January. Yesterday I had a multi-hour planning meeting with the Headteacher and an assistant head, as well as FOUR people from our corporate partners. We discussed everything from the kind of students we want to target the Project at (we agreed to select students based on their motivation) to the make-up of the advisory board.

I’m super pumped to be embarking on something with such a dynamic and committed team. Jamie the Headteacher is a force of nature and is determined to get the best for his students. Our corporate partners have the highest standards imaginable and are dead-set on making the Project an outstanding success! Also exciting is that this partnership is truly unique: The Access Project will be fully embedded in the fabric of the school, and our corporate partner is putting their full weight – from their HR team to their Managing Partner – into helping the students excel. Awesome!

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