Posts Tagged ‘Achievement Gap’
Posted on: October 22nd, 2012 by chrishall Top universities are desperate to admit more students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Unfortunately, accepting more students from these backgrounds would dilute academic standards, a price that universities cannot afford to pay. This trade-off between excellence and widening participation informs much of the debate about access to higher education and frequently provides universities with a ready-made excuse as to why they cannot alter admissions policy to assist potential students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
But whilst it might seem like a self-evident truth that, for example, giving lower offers to students from poorer backgrounds will reduce academic standards, the evidence suggests that this is not necessarily the case. As Alan Milburn puts it in his report on higher education, ‘the distinction between equity and excellence is a false one’. Amongst the evidence Milburn cites to defend this claim are two reports by the Higher Education Funding Council for England which found that students from state schools are more likely to do well at university than students from private schools who have the same A-level grades. The reason for this is straightforward; exam results measure achievement rather than potential, and students who have achieved a set of results despite a lower quality of education probably have more potential than those who end up with the same results after receiving a first-rate education. Rather than undermining academic excellence, giving students from disadvantaged backgrounds lower offers may actually improve standards at that university.
Even if standards did slip as a result of policies aimed at improving access for poorer students it is not clear why this should lead to an automatic rejection of such policies. As important as academic excellence is, it should not be the only goal universities pursue. Like all public institutions they have a broader responsibility to ensure that they uphold basic values like fairness. The entire pre-university education system tempers the pursuit of excellence by recognising a range of other values. The prospect of secondary schools refusing to admit less able students for fear of undermining academic excellence strikes us as unpalatable because we recognise that fairness requires that schools do everything they can to serve as wide a cross section of the local community as possible.
The fact that universities are selective does not absolve them of the responsibility to be fair. At the moment this is interpreted narrowly to mean that they must not discriminate between applicants with equally impressive applications. However, if universities are to maintain their status as progressive institutions of learning they must move towards recognising a more comprehensive notion of fairness, one that takes account of the broader impact that university admissions can have on society and acknowledges that well motivated institutions that fail to take into account the context in which they operate can end up perpetuating disadvantage. It is no longer good enough for them to hide behind the myth of excellence.
Posted on: July 30th, 2012 by alexkelly In the late 1960s, researchers put a marshmallow on a plate in front of 4 year olds and told them to wait. The children were left on their own, and told that if they held on for 15 minutes, instead of one marshmallow they’d get two. The researchers timed how long it took the children to crack. They found that there was a strong correlation between how long the children waited, and their eventual success in life – in terms of how well they did at school, at work, and in their relationships.
 The children’s socio economic backgrounds weren’t measured in the research, but I would guess that these would have been significant determinants in how long the children managed to wait. This makes sense to me because richer children are more likely to grow up in households where they have regular mealtimes, they do their homework every night, and what adults tell them is going to happen, generally happens. They learn regularity, and in turn they are able to delay their gratification.
Succeeding in school is all about delaying gratification – the pain of slogging through French GCSE homework on a sunny evening is worth it because it will eventually pay off with a job in a good law firm.
This is one of the focuses for The Access Project’s tutoring programme. The weekly visit to a tutor, who asks the student how last week went and what they need to work on for next week, means the student can deal in units of days instead of units of years. This makes school life easier for the child. In addition, the regularity of the sessions, as well as the child seeing over time that their hard work is paying off through better test scores, hopefully means that they learn a more general lesson about the value of delaying gratification. Perhaps one of the tests for the efficacy of our programme should be a marshmallow test.
Posted on: July 13th, 2012 by admin Unusually for this blog, I am not employed by The Access Project but rather I occupy the dual role of tutor and university partner. You may have seen in an earlier blog that in March this year, several TAP tutees visited the Royal Veterinary College, University of London (RVC) to take part in a dissection class. This class was organised by me, and my job overall is to provide visits to the RVC for disadvantaged learners of all age groups.
 Last week saw my flagship event of the year, the RVC Summer University. This was part-funded by the Sutton Trust and open only to students from non-selective state maintained schools and with no parental history of attending university. Summer Schools such as these provide a vital experience for less privileged students – a chance to learn exactly what university is like. They cannot ask their parents or their peers and will have largely heard about university in the media as a place to become laden with debt whilst trying to get a degree that might help them get a job in the long run. A Summer School gives the students a chance to see how the teaching vastly differs from in school, how they’ll be learning things that they actually want to and how much they’ll enjoy living with a group of people they’ve never met before.
 It took place over 4 days, with the students staying in our halls of residence and completing lectures, seminars and practical sessions. This being a veterinary university, the students were ultrasounding lambs, dissecting dogs and being entertained by meerkats throughout the week! Also included were workshops on applying to university and student finance. Whilst less glamorous, these sessions were rated as the most useful of the week by 32 of the 50 students in attendance. For many of the students, it was their first time away from home and for all of them it was their first real insight into what studying at university will be like.
Personally, I feel that residential summer schools are one of the best tools we have for raising aspiration and attainment in young people. The Sutton Trust have found that, amongst other things, summer schools make the biggest difference to the poorest students – in some cases removing completely the gap in the success in university applications of more affluent students and their less fortunate peers. I only need to look as far as the feedback from the students last week to see the difference that they make:
“Amazing, widened my perspective in uni! Loved every minute!”
“Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who was involved in making this week absolutely amazing! I learned so much, did so much – brilliant! (Totally worth missing college for).”
And my personal favourite…
“James Cannon = amazing!”
I know from previous years that I will see many of these students back here for interviews next Spring and some of them as undergraduates in Autumn 2013. The statistical evidence from the Sutton Trust is all well and good, but seeing it happen and knowing it was our work that gave these students a springboard from which to progress is incredibly motivating.
Some excellent photos (the better ones taken by none other than TAP’s Olivia Ide) of the Summer School can be found here.
Posted on: July 6th, 2012 by alexkelly Ask a politician or a journalist, and they’ll normally say the problem is a lack of aspiration on the part of the disadvantaged kids. They’ll add that this stems from the parents, and is reinforced by the teachers.
I realized that this was rubbish pretty soon after starting to teach in a school at which more than 60% of the students were on Free School Meals (the national averages is about 15%). It was 2005, and the government at the time was pumping tens of millions into Aim Higher, which as the name suggests, was all about raising aspirations.
Aspiration was clearly not the issue because every student I spoke to at the school – and I mean every one of them – from those in the top set to those in set 7 – wanted to go to Oxford or Cambridge. Sure, most of the boys’ first choices were to be a footballer, and most the girls’ first choices were to be some kind of film or pop star (frankly, a very sensible first dream – you wouldn’t find anything different at a leading public school), but ask again, and the kids’ more earth-bound aim was to graduate from a top university.
The parents were even more aspirational. At parents’ evening it was clear that Oxbridge wasn’t enough – medicine or law was what they wanted for their kids.
I get angry when people bang on about the need to raise aspirations firstly because it’s patronizing to families from lower socio economic backgrounds. I sat on a panel last week with a journalist (who’s won the Orwell Prize for journalism) who said that what was so tough for working class kids going to top universities was that they had to leave their families’ values behind. What a fool. She should go to any parents’ evening up or down the country, and try to put paper between the values of parents from different economic backgrounds.
The second reason I get angry when people say that the big problem is aspiration, is that it makes inequality of access to top universities seem much easier to solve than it really is. All you’d need to do would be to show disadvantaged kids how great top universities are, wheel out a few undergraduates from disadvantaged backgrounds, and the problem would be solved.
How could this be enough when 25% of students from the poorest backgrounds fail to meet the expected attainment at the end of primary school, compared to 3% of students from the most affluent backgrounds? Our challenge isn’t to switch on desire in disadvantaged students’ minds, it’s to demolish the fact that in the UK a student’s background determines how well they do in school.
Posted on: February 10th, 2012 by admin 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.
Posted on: December 7th, 2011 by alexkelly 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.
Posted on: October 27th, 2011 by alexkelly  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.
(more…)
|
