Examination of Witnesses (Questions 940
- 959)
TUESDAY 18 JULY 2000
PROFESSOR A H HALSEY,
DR N G MCCRUM
AND PROFESSOR
DYLAN WILIAM
Chairman
940. Professor Wiliam indicated he wanted to
speak.
(Professor Wiliam) There is a danger in assuming once
we get to parity in the selection ratio between independent and
state schools that we have cracked a problem. My baseline is when
93 per cent of places in Oxford and Cambridge are going to state
school students, then I will be happy.
Dr Harris: Some people argue it is 80:20 because
that is the proportion in the state sector taking A-levels.
Valerie Davey: Those days are a long way off.
Dr Harris
941. But I agree with you.
(Professor Wiliam) We need to focus away from A-levels.
They are a means to an end, not an end in themselves. They are
ways that universities can judge talent. The fact we level the
playing field in terms of A-level grades is not the end of the
problem. We should be trying to find ways to make sure we are
choosing children with talent however it manifests itself and
to make sure that they have the opportunity to go to elite institutions.
942. Quite so.
(Professor Halsey) I want to stress that obviously
it is within the province of Oxford to look after the equalisation
of the admissions rates. Secondly, there is a problem, which is
shared between Oxford University and you, in raising the application
rate. Thirdly, the most important thing of all, and this is entirely
your responsibility, is to raise the quality of state education
in order to get rid of this problem of inequality in the application
rate.
Chairman
943. Before I call Helen Jones I really must
as Chairman ask you to tell us how. We understand the long term,
you are saying we have got to go back to the womb. We understand
the long journey that we are embarked on in terms of increasing
educational standards in the state sector but what you have not
answered, and some of my colleagues have put this to you, is already
66 per cent of three straight As are in the state sector, but
what do we do in the short term. John Maynard Keynes said, "In
the long term we are all dead." I am willing to wait for
improved standards to work through the system but 66 per cent
of three straight As are in the state sector, so why are they
not applying to Oxford today? Can we encourage them?
(Professor Halsey) We do not know. There has been
an inquiry of course as to why they do not and students say that
they are not confident they will meet the required standard for
admission, which does not help you very much, does it? You have
already discussed all sorts of ways in which missionary work can
go on from inside the universities to get up the application rate.
I think that is important, of course, but it seems to me that
you must face the fundamental issue which is to invest in state
education. You must do that to bring state schools up to the same
standards as are current in the so-called independent schools.
944. Professor Wiliam, what is your view on
this?
(Professor Wiliam) There are three processes involved
here. One is recruitment, one is selection and one is retention.
The first is getting those kids to believe that Oxford and Cambridge
are for them. It is a huge job. There are biases currently in
selection procedures but I think they are probably more stark
than indicated because of this use of A-levels. There is also
retention. There is no point sending these kids to these elite
universities if they are not going to thrive there. There may
be questions about the experience that people have there, I do
not know. It seems to me any attempt to address this problem needs
to look at these three issues of recruitment, selection and retention.
Helen Jones
945. Can I first of all apologise to our witnesses
for coming in late. I was in the Chamber and could not come out
until the end of the Chancellor's statement. I wanted to explore,
if I may, a question I exposed with representatives from Oxford
which is that the representation on first degree courses of those
from social classes three to five is low in all universities,
we accept that, but it is particularly low in Oxford compared
to other universities like King's, UCL and Imperial, which have
much higher rates of participation. Can you shed any light on
why that should be so and also what can be done about it, how
can it be tackled in the short term, as the Chairman said?
(Professor Wiliam) As an outsider to Oxford and Cambridge,
I should say all I know is that amongst young people there is
a perception that Oxford and Cambridge are different from all
the rest. There is no question that a decision to apply to Oxford
or Cambridge is seen as a qualitatively different decision to
one of applying to Imperial, King's and UCL, even though they
are similar in research terms. So I cannot throw any light on
what makes people decide not to apply. I will hand over to colleagues
from Oxford.
Chairman
946. Professor Halsey?
(Professor Halsey) We do not know.
Helen Jones
947. The Oxford explanation is working class
oiks like me prefer big cities, which coming from Chester I find
a bit strange.
(Professor Halsey) You have heard from Dr Lucas and
the people who came with him that, as I call it, missionary work
is going on. They are trying to be in constant communication with
those schools in the state sector who have not had the tradition
of making applications to Oxford. They are trying to get more
teachers and pupils to look at the place and to see that it is,
in fact, a human place after all. I think it is a slow job and
I do not know how effective it will be.
948. Would it be your view—and perhaps
Professor Wiliam has some views on that—that it is actually
the selection process itself for Oxford which puts people off
applying, particularly the interviewing process, and particularly
having to apply to different colleges in many cases?
(Professor Halsey) I do not think we know.
949. Fair enough.
(Professor Halsey) I do not know how we could know
really. Without further systematic research.
Mr O'Brien
950. I hope to look at the targets for widening
access, but one of the questions that I asked the Vice Chancellor,
and he suggested that I should also ask any others from Oxford,
was whether the Chancellor or anybody else on his behalf had any
prior contact with anybody from Oxford before he made his attack
and outburst on Oxford University? Did he have any contact with
either of you, Professor Halsey or Dr McCrum?
(Professor Halsey) He did not talk to me.
(Dr McCrum) No.
951. In that case as a point of clarification—
(Professor Halsey) I would like to make a comment
on that, Chairman. If you turn up the Edinburgh Review
for the 1830s and 1840s it is much more comprehensive and outspoken
in its attack on Oxford and Cambridge and very much more literate.
952. Thank you. I think this is probably a question
primarily for Professor Wiliam. I was interested in your personal,
admittedly subjective, view where you start from which is you
feel there is not an uneven distribution of talent across the
whole of society. I was a little bit surprised that that was your
starting point when the criticism you make of the interview process
is that in itself the likelihood of bias is as much as to do with
subjective approaches and subjective assessments as to do with
a lack of training. If it becomes a competition between subjectivity
of approach, is that likely to lead us to any better position
than we are in today?
(Professor Wiliam) One of the things that I have learnt
as a professor of educational assessment is that ultimately subjectivity
is all we have. Any system that claims to be objective, underlying
it are deep seated subjectivities. What I would hope is that there
are inter-subjectivities: that is agreements about what is reasonable
and what is not that will actually take us out of this vicious
cycle. The evidence that I have is that the lower the cultural
bias in an assessment the better students from disadvantaged backgrounds
do, and if you extrapolate, which is always a dangerous thing
to do, you end up saying as a starting point that there is no
difference. As I said, as a starting point there is no evidence
against that and I think it is a useful thing to bear in mind
as what we need to start at as our ideal, until we have further
evidence that is not actually attainable in any real sense.
953. Just on that particular point, at what
point does your personal prescription cross from an aspiration,
or justice, in your terms, to social engineering?
(Professor Wiliam) If you actually said, "I am
going to choose a test which is completely arbitrary and set artificial
benchmarks so that I get an equal number from each of the social
classes or according to their representation", that would
be social engineering. What I am interested in is trying to work
towards theories about what counts as a merit and what counts
as value, so that you can actually do it in a quite—Let
me give you an example. In this Access to Medicine project that
we are running at King's we have a problem of identifying young
people of talent to go into medicine in September 2001, when they
will not have the right A-level grades. What do we do? We could
actually just lower the A-level grade, but we decided not to do
that because that means that you are actually, in effect, social
engineering. What we are going to do instead is to have tests
of learning potential and we are going to calibrate those tests
on existing medical under-graduates. So these people that we are
going to take will be exactly the same as the existing medical
under-graduates chosen by the old methods in terms of their learning
potential in terms of their ability to reason scientifically.
So it is actually not social engineering, it is actually changing
what we are looking for to be more inclusive. I would be arguing
that no matter what the percentages were, even if it was that
working class people were over represented.
Mr O'Brien: That is not the terms of my understanding
of what your argument is. Turning to Professor Halsey and Dr McCrum,
part of your argument, as I understand it, is to set quotas for
fair targets for the proportion of state school pupils admitted
to Oxford. Apart from looking for a comment as to whether setting
such a target, A) would it discriminate against pupils from independent
schools? B) would they in fact be quotas rather than aspirations?
C) would you drive that by financial penalties or rewards? Finally,
who is best to judge how a student is going to get the most out
of Oxford, the pupil, the teacher, the government or the university
itself?
Chairman
954. That is rather a complicated set of questions.
I will not mind if you ask to be reminded as you go through.
(Dr McCrum) All we say is that of the people equally
qualified, say at three As, you should take the same proportion
from each of the two areas. If you take 60 per cent, as you do
at the moment, from the independent sector, why should you take
only 50 per cent of the three As from the state sector? That is
what we are saying. They should be equal. If you call that a quota,
that is a quota, but I would have thought the word quota does
not suit that.
Mr O'Brien
955. Would you disaggregate that by the three
As are those who apply for a particular course at a particular
university and then look at the proportion in terms of the up-take
of offers?
(Dr McCrum) Yes, you ought to say, "What is the
target?" The target is to get people to take their final
exams well and to do well. In that case at the moment A-levels
are the best thing you have got. Then we look at the three A-levels,
which is what most of our people have, and you should really not
take a smaller proportion of the state people than the independent
people, and that is what we do at the moment.
956. Would you drive that with financial penalties
and rewards?
(Dr McCrum) It is not for me to say, but personally
I would not. I would just say until we wrote out papers this was
not known. What was known was that the aggregate for all people
of whatever A-level favoured the independents, but what we showed
was that if you look at the different strata, three As, two As
and a B, etc, you get the same problem and, therefore, it is a
simple thing to put right and it should not take long.
957. Am I right to take the implication from
your answer that it would discriminate against pupils from independent
schools?
(Dr McCrum) No it would not, it would mean that they
would not have the leverage that they have now, but in a year
or two when things were equal we would be taking the same proportion
of independent people at three As as state at three As.
(Professor Wiliam) That will still be bias in my view.
(Dr McCrum) We accept that. I think Chelly and I have
gone for three As. We know that it is a measure of potential.
It is not fair to expect the state person to get three As and
say he has the same potential as somebody from the independent
sector with three As, that is not fair, but we think for a first
stab at it to try and get inequality eliminated it is best to
accept things as they are, because we do not know what to say,
we would not know whether to say it should be two As and a B or
three As and so on. At the moment we accept that looking for three
As from the state is a pretty rough target, but the people do
seem to get it and it would be hoped that we can get things sorted
out.
(Professor Wiliam) It is very straightforward for
any university to do this if it wants to. What you do is you actually
reverse engineer the degree class. So you actually look at your
students and you use marks rather than the classes, because you
wish to aggregate it towards the class, but then you actually
say, "What offer would I have had to give the state students
to compare with a given offer from the independent school students
in term of their mark on output?" That would be an entirely
rational, logical, defensible and transparent way of setting slightly
lower requirements for state school students than independent
school students.
958. In part, the answer to my final long question,
which I apologise for, are you saying that part of that reverse
engineering would also carry marks for how to measure that a student
would get the best out of the university, because it might extend
to more than just A-level and those other very demonstrably measurable
type of qualifications? My concern is that there is a thought
that I am receiving from you that in the institutions, the universities,
the academic excellence centres, for instance, the students are
being assessed to see whether they will get the best out of it
over the period that they are there. Should that not be the university
or is it better to favour the student, teacher or the Government
to come up with some form of criteria by which that competence
level, however you want to describe it, the hinterland of the
individual, is measured?
(Professor Wiliam) Given the reverse engineering that
I have just talked about I think the other thing that would be
important would be to measure retention rates. If, for example,
certain kinds of students, whatever their background, male, female,
ethnic minorities, if there were unjustifiable divergencies from
the norm for retention I think that should rightly cause concern.
959. Professor Halsey, with the Oxford experience?
(Professor Halsey) Difficult. I do not know whether
retention should be thought of increasingly as including graduate
experience as well as the under-graduate degree. I do not know
whether one should equate for four year degrees or three year
degrees and so on. It would seem to me to be a very difficult
territory to enter. Again, and I know you will not like this,
but you have to fall back on the field trials that can only be
imposed from outside the system of higher education to check out
this hypothesis.
Chairman: Gordon wanted to come in on the same
tack really, so I will take him and then the very patient Michael
Foster has been waiting for his turn for a very long time.
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