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Dr. Evan Harris: I would be grateful if the hon. Gentleman responded to two brief points. First, what evidence does he have that the proportion of working-class students—not state school students—in the 1960s in Cambridge was higher than it is now? Secondly, does he have anything to say about secondary modern schools?

Mr. Maples: I understand the argument about grammar schools and why many people felt strongly about abolishing them, but the hon. Gentleman has to acknowledge, as other people do, that when we abolished grammar schools we abolished a route for the bright working-class kid to get to Cambridge. Seventy-five per cent. of my year in my college at Cambridge came from the state sector and many of them were working class. I do not know the exact proportion, but in abolishing those schools we abolished one of the ladders by which bright kids climbed. Our present system is failing those children. It is reflected in the figures that people are talking about. The challenge is not to manipulate university admissions but to raise the quality of state education for bright kids, particularly in inner-city areas.

I spent a couple of hours last night talking to the former senior tutor at my old college and the head of a college at Oxford about that issue. They both described the enormous trouble that they went to in their outreach programmes, with fellows going around schools that never traditionally sent pupils to Oxford or Cambridge. The head of the college at Oxford said, "We interview everyone who applies to our college. Our benchmark is three As at A-level but we do not say we will not interview you unless you get them. We are trying hard to encourage that but we meet resistance. We do not just meet inertia—we meet prejudice."

Some schools are saying, "Don't apply to Oxford and Cambridge. It's not the university for you," or something like that. They are prejudiced against them. That must be overcome, too. There is a push and a pull. Schools that do not send people to our top universities must think of encouraging those kids and raising their aspirations, at which point they might go. I do not mean to talk as though Oxford and Cambridge are the only good universities. There are 20 fantastic universities and it applies to them, too.

Mr. Sheerman: The hon. Gentleman and I were almost contemporaries: I was at the LSE and he was at Cambridge. The range of universities one could choose from was tiny compared with now. Students now regularly have the choice to go to Warwick, a fast-moving university, or Nottingham, for example. There is such a range of excellent universities, even for the most academic subjects. Oxford and Cambridge have far greater competition for the brightest students. Is not that the truth?
 
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Mr. Maples: I agree. There is a range of universities. People would argue about where the line is, but the Russell group provides fantastic education. The hon. Gentleman is right. When he and I went to university, not only was the percentage smaller but there were hardly any women there. I suspect that it has got more difficult for a man to get in.

Much has been made of A-levels being a bad predictor of success at university. That is well enough established for us to take it on board. My two friends at the two universities to whom I spoke yesterday described how they try to make that up by various means. The interview is not just about whether they like the guy or not. It is much more sophisticated than that. Many universities are introducing a legal aptitude test that is designed to test people's aptitude and likely ability in studying law. It is difficult, if not impossible, to coach someone for it, which is one of the criticisms of A-levels; people can be coached for them.

There is also a lot of adjustment. All admissions tutors say, "We are desperate to get bright kids from comprehensive schools, if only to get the Minister off our back and we will make adjustments for it. If someone has two As and a B, we will think, 'Perhaps if they had gone to a grammar school or an independent school they would have got the three As. We will let them in.'" Often, adjustments are made. To encourage, cajole and pester universities about that is fine, but to try to interfere in the process is probably dangerous.

American universities use SATs. I do not know whether those could be applied here but the vice-chancellor of Warwick university, who used to run an American university, is something of a believer in those, and aptitude tests have a future, too.

One of the things that Tomlinson has come up with gives us an opportunity to improve the A-level as a predictor of whether people will do well at university. Many of us have a problem with the idea that there can be some arbitrary adjustment to one's A-level results, with people saying "This is what you must do to get to university and we are going arbitrarily to adjust it to the school you went to, your postcode or how rich or poor your parents are." We need a system that is transparent, understandable and objective, or as objective as possible, so that people will know that, if they got in, they did so on merit and there was not some arbitrary adjustment to their results.

What Tomlinson is proposing with the A-level could achieve that. As the senior tutor of the Cambridge college said to me, "Everyone who applies here has three As or is going to get them. This is no test for us of how able people are. We are getting three or four times as many applicants as we can take. Some of them have four or five As at A-level." We need a better predictor than that. The A-plus, the A-double-plus or whatever Tomlinson proposes may be a way of doing that. The extended essay may be another.

I suggest, too, that we drop the business of grades and publish the marks. Then we would see what marks the person got in the individual exams that were part of the A-level course. The Americans do that and we have something to learn from them on higher education.
 
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Mr. Chaytor: Does the hon. Gentleman accept that what we do not need is a better predictor of A-level grades? We need to move to a post-qualification admission system where the student already has the A-level grades, whether they are published in the form of marks or not.

Mr. Maples: I think that, with the top universities, that will not make any difference, because all the people who apply either have or are going to get three As anyway. It may help with other universities. I was talking about amending the A-level so that it is a better predictor of what degree people are going to get. I thought that that was the criticism of the A-level: it is not a good predictor of how well one will do at university. I suggest that we need an exam that does that. Part of the problem is that we designed an A grade at A-level and more than 20 per cent. of people now get it. I do not think that that is an adequate differentiator of who should go to the top universities and who is meeting the standards.

One can study some subjects at university without having done the A-level. I studied law and there was no A-level in law. However, if someone wants to study chemistry or French, they will have to reach a basic standard before they get to university. Tripos courses at Cambridge in maths and natural sciences are being extended from three to four years because of people's relatively low ability in that subject when they arrive. I am told that, in classics, the first term is often spent in intensive language training to bring people up to the stage that they should have been at when they got there. We must be careful not to erode the entry level of knowledge, regardless of whether the A-level is a good predictor of how well one will do. It is also a benchmark of knowledge. I worry that, if we start to interfere in the admissions process, our world-class universities will not be very good.

I was not going to speak in this debate, because I said what I thought about OFFA in the debate on the Higher Education Bill, but the Minister for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education—I am sorry that he is not here—succeeded in confusing me. I thought that OFFA was pernicious; he said that it was not pernicious, but irrelevant. It may be that he has performed a clever trick: he may have persuaded Labour Back Benchers to vote for tuition fees on the ground that he would interfere in the admissions process, and then produced this toothless tiger to reassure people such as me. Unfortunately, he then appointed a real old, hoary left-winger to run OFFA. That was presumably to reassure the people who had become unassured by the lack of teeth in the tiger.

I was provoked to get involved in the debate by the remark by Sir Martin Harris, who said:

Do people like that still exist? The Government must have found that guy in some intellectual Jurassic park. Apart from anything else, I thought that new Labour had abolished people who thought like that; I thought that that was not allowed any more. I find it unbelievable that a serious academic, the vice-chancellor of one of our universities, appointed to this job by the Government, can actually think like that.
 
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However, four days earlier he said that some state schools, particularly in the inner cities, were

The quotes were four days apart; one was in The Times and one in The Daily Telegraph. I do not know which of those things he believes, but I worry that that is the attitude of the person who will run OFFA. If we want to get the best kids and more mature students from whatever background into our universities, we need to do two things.

First, we need to change the nature of the A-level, so that it becomes a more objective test of whether someone is suitable or qualified, so that the best people can take advantage of university education, and so that it is not simply an exam that people can be coached for at an expensive independent school. Secondly, the Government would do much better to concentrate their effort—and even, dare I say, the £500,000 that OFFA will cost—on trying to raise the quality of academic education for bright kids in inner-city comprehensives.

6.1 pm


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