Examination of witness (Questions 340
- 359)
TUESDAY 20 JUNE 2000
MR PETER
LAMPL
Helen Jones
340. I would just like to follow up something
about the interview process, if I may. We have been looking at
it from the point of view of the student, and I wondered, in your
experience, if it is not necessary also to approach it from the
other direction. In your experience, how much knowledge have the
interviewers got of the kind of background that many more disadvantaged
students come from; because it was interesting that you said to
us earlier that the greatest rate of success for state school
students was in maths, and maths is not culture-specific, as a
lot of the arts subjects are? If I can give you just one example,
from my own experience. I ought to declare that I am a UCL graduate,
because the Chairman is keen on us declaring where we come from.
I can remember, when we applied to university, we were always
asked what newspapers we read, and everyone from my background
read the Daily Mirror, because that is what they got at
home; but if you had your wits about you, when you applied to
university, you always said you read The Times. Now that
is not an indication of ability, is it, it is an indication of
where you come from. Do you find that those are problems with
the interviewing process as well, and, if so, what are these universities
doing, the ones you work with, to address them?
(Mr Lampl) As I said, I do not interview students
and I do not really know what goes on in interviews with students,
so I think you should get someone from Oxford in here who can
answer that question better than I can. I think the issue with
interviewing students at Oxbridge is that, because of the collegiate
system, that is a very personal decision of the interviewer, because
some of the people here have been through the tutorial system,
but that person, effectively, is going to be your main person
for three or four years; and so one has got to question whether
there is some human nature there, there has got to be, in effect,
chemistry comes into it. If I were in a faculty and I were interviewing
you to come and read history, but I was going to be one of your
teachers, or maybe you will be working with other teachers, that
is a different situation in an interview than if you are going
to be my student for three or four years. So I think that there
is an issue there that human beings are human beings, and I am
not saying that those people—if you look at the tutors,
many of them, I think, the majority, have actually come from state
schools themselves, that could create bias both ways, they could
be biased against an independent school person because they do
not share the same background, they could be biased against the
state school person. But I think the fact that individuals are
actually picking students that they are going to teach, and a
tutorial happens every week, etc., etc., obviously creates a situation
where there could be, that the decision is made not 100 per cent
on objective grounds but on whether I can work with that person.
So I think there is an issue there; but I do not think it goes
against, necessarily, state students or independent students,
I just think there is a whole issue with, "Do I have the
right to pick my students," because, I think, the people
that go through these universities, I looked at the Committee
here and I think every one bar one has been to one of the universities
we have talked about. And the other interesting thing, if you
look at Prime Ministers since the war, anyone who has been to
university has been to only one university, eight of them have
been to one university, and three have not been to university;
so in your business it is obviously very important. So I think
we are talking about here, very important that we get the right
people through these places, because I believe that they end up
in leadership positions, down the road, and it has been like that
for as long as we can all remember. So I think this is a really
important thing that we get right, and I think that is a potential,
that there could be a personal issue there that comes in; so I
think that needs to be addressed
341. I understand what you are saying.
(Mr Lampl) And I am not saying it goes against any
type of student, I am just saying there is a personal decision.
342. But that would indicate that there is even
more necessity for training in interviewing techniques, would
it not, if you are choosing students that the state funds; after
all, it could be argued, it is not the duty of tutors to choose
people just that they feel comfortable with?
(Mr Lampl) And what we are saying is that this is
such an important function that these universities play in picking
these students that go through there, that it has not been handled
professionally; interview techniques, summer schools, Year Ten
visits, all these things, we are saying it needs to be much more
structured and properly thought out, because it is such an important
function. And, really, you come from the American side, one of
the most important things they do is picking who goes to those
places, and they put a lot of resource and time into making sure
they get the right people; whereas I do not think, with all due
respect to our leading universities, that we put enough resource
behind that. And that is not their fault, as you know, they are
all very resource-constrained, in all sorts of other ways, which
I am sure is going to be the subject of your Committee, that there
is an issue about funding in these universities, so it is not
like they have got a lot of resources lying around that can be
applied to this.
Mr O'Brien: I should declare that I am a graduate
of Cambridge, and indeed was a Syndic, which is the equivalent
of a non-executive director, at the Cambridge University Careers
Service for seven years, as an international industrialist on
that body. Interestingly, 25 years ago, I applied for Clare College,
Cambridge, and Dr Feinstein was the admissions tutor and he said
no independent schoolboys, or girls, whatsoever, and so I had
to go and find another college, and fortunately I managed to secure
that. And I think that may be an illustration of what I would
like you to explore a bit more, the way this is working within
the collegiate system, as against those which are on pan-university
admissions, and where you have got to look at it on a comparative
basis, I believe, between one discipline and another discipline
across universities. And your comments would be welcome.
Chairman: Sorry; was that a question?
Mr O'Brien
343. It was, yes.
(Mr Lampl) Can you repeat it, please? I did not see
the question bit of it.
344. I was asking for comments on where you
have the collegiate system, which clearly has an implication as
part of the top universities, so called, but some of the top universities
are not collegiate, and there may be distinctions there which
you may have perceived. And, secondly, applying for certain disciplines;
you have mentioned maths, but obviously there is a range of others,
and that may vary across the universities?
(Mr Lampl) We think that, obviously, there is less
opportunity for, if you like, admissions issues in a non-collegiate
university, that that is probably a preferable way of admitting
students. But what was surprising was, from the figures that we
have here, that we have been focusing on Oxbridge and three or
four other leading universities, that when you look at the data
you find that Imperial is 18 per cent from its bench-mark, you
find that UCL is 17 per cent from its bench-mark. I think the
surprising thing about the analysis we did, or that HEFCE did,
is that, if you like, the access issues are not related to the
collegiate universities but are related to a whole range of universities;
and I am not exactly sure what is going on there, to be honest,
I think we have looked more at the collegiate universities. But,
again, I think it is probably the same kinds of things. I cannot
stress how important this issue is, of having to apply before
you know your A levels, and I think that is a huge issue which
goes through all of this, whether you are applying to a collegiate
university or to a subject-based-entry university, like Imperial
or UCL.
Chairman
345. But is not Stephen making a very important
point here, in that, if you have a collegiate system, one of the
things about a collegiate system is that you actually have to
know your way around it, so that even to the level of which college
is under great demand this year, and, of course, that changes
in terms of fashion, and only people very close to Oxford, Cambridge,
or other collegiate systems, Durham, know what that sort of information
is. The level of information you have to have is pretty scarce
and only a very few people would be knowledgeable enough to know
that.
(Mr Lampl) I think there is an issue there, and I
think what you are coming back to is whether you admit on a university
basis, and that is obviously a matter that could be a subject
for debate. What I am saying though is that the end result is
that the collegiate universities are not the only ones that have
got a problem, that other universities that are admitting on a
non-collegiate basis are just as—
346. All the London schools?
(Mr Lampl) The London schools, yes.
Mr O'Brien
347. So, just pursuing the point, because you
mentioned it as you were giving your response, clearly, again
in the past, there used to be the thing that independent schools
used to use a lot, which was the seventh term, sixth and then
nine months out, which was a real opportunity to have assessed
the grades at A level and the aptitude, and it is really taking
you forward on that. And I will not repeat Nick St. Aubyn's point
about the year out, which I think is a great benefit, if you can
have it, and it is a big economic issue for many of the families
that we are talking about. One of the issues that has cropped
up is aptitude and how there is a perception, be that at interview
stage or in any other way, about a potential student being able
"to make best use of the university, as well as being apt
for the discipline and having the necessary grades." What
is your experience, and perhaps further being a businessman, whether
there are any bench-marks from the United States as to how they
have tackled that particular problem of aptitude, and even parental
support, in trying to change some of the cultures?
(Mr Lampl) I think, having looked at the US system,
I was very impressed by how they were able to use the SAT test
to identify bright kids from the sorts of backgrounds we are talking
about, and to be able to use that as part of admissions. Our feeling
is, and not just ours but a lot of people feel, that basing admissions
on projected A levels, which is what we do in this country, is
very narrow and also very uncertain, because, after all, we are
talking about projections, which, as often as not, are wrong anyway.
So we think that basing admissions on A levels is much too narrow.
There is some other interesting work that has been done at King's
College, London, on looking at the uncertainties with A levels,
which I think the Committee should look at, which is, they said,
if you take a group of students that should get three As, on any
given day, about half of them will not get the three As, because
they had a bad day in that one subject, or they revised the wrong
things and they got unlucky with the papers, or the marking was
not consistent. So, when we put these barriers up and say, "You've
all got to get three As," half the people who should get
them do not—and then, conversely, some of the people that
were two As and a B, they are talking about entry for medical
schools now where three As is sort of the standard, is the hurdle
rate, and they also showed that, obviously, some people, who were
not as good as those three As people, who should get two As and
a B, they sometimes end up getting three As, because things go
well for them on that day, or whatever. So there is huge uncertainty,
and to put a bar up and say, "You've got to get three As,"
when a lot of people who at that level actually are not going
to get them on the day, obviously, casts doubt on the whole system.
So we feel that if we could introduce something, and the SAT may
not be the right test, who knows, but we have started with it
because it has been around for 80 years, and it has been widely
used in America and has now been introduced in Singapore as well.
We are running some trials at the moment, with NFER, who are doing
the work, and we have got 60 schools, some poor-performing state
schools, some good state schools, some independent schools, and
when the A levels come out they have all taken the SAT already,
we have had about 30 or so students in each school take the SAT,
when the A level results come out in August NFER are going to
look to see whether the SATs are telling us anything different
from GCSEs and A levels. And, if it is, I think it is an interesting
line of inquiry, because, after all, there are a lot of schools
in this country where there are a lot of bright students that
are underperforming because they are not in very good schools.
Chairman: Mr Lampl, I think Valerie Davey has
been very patient, waiting to ask you a question here.
Valerie Davey
348. I was going to follow up, indeed, but,
before I do that, I represent Bristol, and the University of Bristol
is in my constituency, so I understand many of the issues that
you have raised today, I was going to say that we had assumed,
until your last comments, that the A level was the bench-mark
for entry into university. Given the work you have now done, and
I shall be very interested to hear the outcome, how far do you
think the aptitude test would benefit, or not, those who have
been to independent schools, those who come from a lower economic
background; is there anything there which is more standard than
the impact of A level on the youngsters we have been talking about?
(Mr Lampl) I think, if you look at our school system,
it is not dissimilar from America, in terms of the fact that we
have got some very poor-performing state schools, quite clearly,
we have got some pretty good state schools and we have got some
very good independent schools, so they have got a similar situation,
less on the independent side but there is a big disparity in performance
between schools in the States just like there is in this country,
a huge disparity. And I think the way the SAT works in the States
is that it enables, I think, it benefits kids who are in poor-performing
schools in the States, because they can do well on the SAT, and
the leading universities actually target students from the SAT,
they get a printout of everyone's SAT in America, and they actually
target students with good SATs. Now they do not take in students
that cannot handle the course, but it does give them an indication
that that student may be grossly underperforming because they
are in a bad school, but then you find out they have done very
well on the SAT. For instance, for some of the top subjects, at
good universities, you might need two As and a B to get in, if
you had a student with three Bs who was from a very poor-performing
school and who did very well on the SAT, we are not talking here
about positive discrimination in a sort of unstructured way, but
you could say, well, that student will probably do very well reading,
whatever it is, physics, at Bristol, in your case; so I think
it can be very useful. And that is the way the American universities
use it; they look at the SAT as one factor in a range, they look
at achievement as well as aptitude and potential. I think the
idea that the fair way to admit people to universities is what
they have achieved at 18 needs to be examined; why should that
be, it is almost like the gold standard, and that is just the
fair way of doing it. I am not sure it really is, and that certainly
in America they look at other things, other than achievement at
18, they look at potential, and we do not have any measure of
that in this country.
349. Can I ask, just on the back of that, very
briefly, do you include in the work you have done and the research
you are doing the further education colleges, to which some of
our youngsters now go, I think, in increasing numbers, for a change
at 16, they leave school, and go into them; that is all part of
it?
(Mr Lampl) They are all included, yes.
350. And have you noticed any differentiation
in that respect yet; are they gaining more or fewer places to
your "good" universities?
(Mr Lampl) The FE colleges, we have just started with
a project at Mansfield College, Oxford, we are funding a recruitment
officer at Mansfield, who is just going to work FE colleges and
go in and persuade students to apply. Yes, the FE college is hugely
underrepresented at leading universities, relative to their performance.
And I would like to see lots of recruitment officers go in FE
colleges, I would like to see leading universities compete for
these students, which is what happens in the States; if you are
a bright kid in Brooklyn and you have got good SATs and a decent
academic performance, you have got Harvard and Princeton and Yale
coming to try to recruit you. I think that is terrific. In this
country, those students get lost.
Chairman
351. I can certainly see the whole point of
this recruitment officer actually going out and tracking down,
and I can also see very much having a variety of ways, at least
two ways, of assessing a student. But what strikes me is a recent
visit to Oxford, where a senior Oxford Master said to me, "The
trouble is, we don't have many emissaries in the schools any longer;
in other words, most of our people here go into the City of London,
they become corporate lawyers, they do not become teachers, not
any of them." And so, in the more deprived areas of our country,
many of these children in schools today will never meet anyone
who has been to Oxford or Cambridge, or to Durham, or to Bristol,
or to the LSE. So that is a real problem, that has got to be balanced
by some of the other systems.
(Mr Lampl) Yes; not too many independent schools.
Mr O'Brien
352. Not through an independent school; that
is right.
(Mr Lampl) That is why you need an admissions officer.
Most of these admissions officers that these American universities
have, and Harvard has got 50 of them, are ex-Harvard graduates,
they are generally in their mid twenties, and they go into the
schools and say, "I'm a regular guy, I'm from Harvard; why
don't you apply." And it is not just the application, they
work with them through the application, they work with them after
they have been made an offer, there is a lot of stuff that goes
on after the initial contact, so it is a whole process.
Mr Foster
353. As a former A level tutor at an FE college,
I am fascinated by what you have been saying about SATs, and I
would like to come back at a later date to explore that, because
I think there is a great deal in that, but I would like to look
at a possible solution to the problems that you have identified.
Should the Government set targets or quotas for the proportion
of students from lower socio-economic groups that go to universities?
(Mr Lampl) No, I think that is wrong, because I think,
if you do that, you are going to admit students just to make a
target and a quota, and I think students should be admitted on
the basis of merit, however we define it; at the moment, we define
it as projected performance at A level, and we have got to live
with that, I hope that we get a broader definition of merit. But
I think what this study has shown is that, just on the definition
of merit that we use, which is A level performance, there are
thousands of students from the non-privileged backgrounds that
should be going to our leading universities that are not, and
the first order of business is to get that right, and I think
you do that by recruitment, recruitment officers, summer schools,
Year Ten visits, teacher summer schools, all those kinds of activities.
Chairman
354. You can have targets and goals with no
diminution of standard though, can you not? The argument is, there
is a hell of a lot of people with very good A levels out there,
from more deprived communities and more deprived schools, who
do not come to the so-called leading universities; you can still
have targets and goals without any dilution of quality, surely?
(Mr Lampl) That is correct. What we are saying is
that what this data shows is that you can get to the bench-marks
without any dilution of quality at all, that those people are
out there. In fact, you could argue that there are people with
less good qualifications getting in because of where the bench-mark
is relative to the actual, there are actually people out there
from non-privileged backgrounds with, if you like, better A levels;
that is what this data actually says, when you think about it.
355. So, Mr Lampl, can we get this straight;
you are saying no to quotas?
(Mr Lampl) No to quotas.
356. But you are not saying no to targets, as
long as there is no dilution in quality?
(Mr Lampl) Yes.
357. Coming from the business world, you must
be used to going for targets in order to stimulate your employees
to achieve certain standards?
(Mr Lampl) I prefer to call it a bench-mark, but,
yes, I think that the way I would like to see it is that the university
should come up with plans to move towards these bench-marks, that
is the way I would like to put it. The problem with this whole
area is that there is a lot of initiatives going on, in all sorts
of places, but there is no real co-ordinated, "This is our
plan." Oxford has actually come up with something but not
really quantified it, but "This is our plan to get from where
we are today," which, in the case of Imperial, is 47 per
cent private, let us say, or 53 per cent state, so they should
be 71 per cent state; so that is sort of the overall objective,
if you like, and this is what we need to do to do that, and we
need to run summer schools, we need to have recruitment officers,
etc., etc. That is the process we would like to see, and we have
actually done a bit of it ourselves, we have done a `back of the
envelope'; and the numbers are not that big, that is the interesting
point.
Mr Foster
358. If that is the process you would like to
see, should the Government look to incentivise such processes,
or penalise those universities that do not embark on those processes?
(Mr Lampl) I do not believe in penalising. I think
the Government should incentivise that process, it should encourage
the universities to come up with plans and resources required,
on the basis that, if the plan makes sense, etc., and that they
are moving in the right direction, the Government will actually
make resources available to put those plans into action. To do
all this on a charitable basis is not really the right approach;
it really should be part of the programme of the university and
the Government, and funding, ultimately, some of it can come from
private people.
Chairman
359. I am sorry to push you on this, Mr Lampl.
Are you not trying to have your cake and eat it, too, in the sense
that you are saying, "Well, lots of things are going on,
in a variety of these leading universities," but is not the
truth that very little of this was going on until you came along;
is not that the truth? In the last three years we have seen the
summer schools, you have said recruitment people, outreach people,
from one of the colleges you mentioned particularly, Mansfield
College. Is that what you are saying, or not?
(Mr Lampl) No. CVCP has initiated a number of things;
the universities have. There are a number of programmes going
on, irrespective of us. We have obviously done something.
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