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.

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.

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 and Slaughter and May – 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!

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!

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 solicitors Slaughter and May: the firm is partnering with us in running the Project at the school. 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. Slaughter and May 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 Slaughter and May are putting their full weight – from their HR team to their Managing Partner – into helping the students excel. Awesome!

– Oualid, Access Project alumnus 2011.

– Adela Read, DECC.

– Karim Ayuni, Booz and Company.

– Richard Verity, partner, Booz and Company.

- Owain Mulligan, tutor.