Examination of Witnesses (Questions 980
- 985)
TUESDAY 18 JULY 2000
PROFESSOR A H HALSEY,
DR N G MCCRUM
AND PROFESSOR
DYLAN WILIAM
980. You do not have a preference?
(Professor Halsey) It is the same old story. I think
it has to be checked out and I want to link it to the experience
I have in my own college (Nuffield College) which is an entirely
graduate institution. I would like to redraw your attention to
my final paragraph. The graduate student is growing fastest in
the 20th Century by a very long way. Indeed, if you extrapolate,
in the future the under-graduate will disappear sometime in the
21st Century and that would get rid of the Oxford class inequality
because—and this is a shaky piece of evidence of course—in
this particular College (Nuffield) more than two-thirds of British
entrants come from the state schools and this fits with Dylan's—
981. But Nuffield is very unusual, Professor
Halsey, as we all know.
(Professor Halsey) I do not know. If your policy is
to give everyone at birth a right to universal post-secondary
education, and I suppose that might be what you would agree, then
it could very well be that the university system is going to be
floating on top as a graduate set of institutions not an under-graduate
set of institutions.
982. The very last question before we wrap this
up entirely. We have valued your evidence immensely but are there
three points of advice that you would like to make that you think
would benefit this inquiry that you would have as your priorities
for us to take on board when we are considering this question
of access? We will start with Professor Wiliam.
(Professor Wiliam) Firstly, A-levels are a means to
an end, not an end in themselves. We have to look at the measurements
and see A-levels as a potentially useful but flawed and limited
source of advice about merit and potential. Secondly, we need
to have a much wider understanding of the inaccuracy of any educational
measurement and we need to make sure their fundamental limitations
are appreciated. And, thirdly, the old rule that you will find
in any assessment textbooks, which is the more different kinds
of sources of evidence on which you are basing your decision,
the more likely it is to be valuable.
983. Professor Halsey?
(Professor Halsey) I agree with the first two recommendations
from Professor Wiliam. I am not sure about the third without much
more enquiry. I would recommend to this Committee that it focuses
attention less on Chancellor Brown's attack on Oxford and much
more on the promise of the Government to make a serious investment
in the up-bringing of its children which might level the playing
field as far as university was concerned. And third, I would want
to reiterate that it is very much the business of Oxford and Cambridge
to get rid of their inequalities at the admissions point and then
to proceed from there to the raising of the application rate in
collaboration with you and any other social forces that are available.
Chairman: Thank you, Professor Halsey. Before
I call Dr McCrum, I hope a smile will come to your face when you
read the Chancellor's statement this afternoon in terms of the
increasing spend on education. I know you were up in this corridor
so you would not have heard it.
Dr Harris: It would have been a broader smile
three years ago.
Chairman
984. Dr McCrum?
(Dr McCrum) We should cherish A-level, it is a very
good system. It is reliable; it is not as, for instance, in most
of Germany, where the Abitur marked in the school; it can be used
at the universities, unlike in Germany where they cannot use the
Abitur in universities. Secondly, I do not think you should encourage
people to shoehorn young folk into Oxford who will then be sent
down after the first or second year. The trauma of that would
be very bad. I think Oxford has to be left to decide its own policy
about admissions, subject to point three which is that the present
inequality should be examined regularly. Oxford will do that,
but inequality should be righted.
Chairman
985. Thank you very much for your attendance.
Can I thank all of you for extending the evidence session by a
little, my colleagues in particular and the people who take the
note of our proceedings. We found this a most enjoyable and informative
session. I do hope that when you are returning to King's or Oxford
and you think of any further information that you can send to
us, we would be very happy to take that on board in our further
deliberations. Thank you very much for your attendance.
(Professor Halsey) Thank you, Chairman
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