Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20
- 39)
THURSDAY 25 NOVEMBER 2004
PROFESSOR STEVEN
SCHWARTZ
Q20 Paul Holmes: As head of the sixth
form, I have come across exactly what you have said. When GNVQs
were introduced and the Government were saying they were the answer
to everything, I went round careers fairs talking to teachers
and most of them did not have a clue what I was talking about.
They had never heard of GNVQs, and yet we were told these would
be the answer to everything. Within large universities, whether
it is Oxbridge or whatever, surely you still have this problem
of individual departments or individual colleges, say at Oxford,
saying, "We want control over our process" and they
are going to use their own admissions tutors. Whereas the central
university admissions tutors know all about the different systems,
I often found, again talking to tutors, that the ones in that
department or in that college did not have a clue, or were operating
their own maverick decisions or their own internal processes,
even though the professional tutors who head up the university
careers system would say all the right things. How do you get
around that?
Professor Schwartz: That is another
reason for wanting to have a bit more centralisation and more
"professionalisation", as we called it, where there
are people who are actually trained—remember that most of
these people who are doing the interviews are very poorly trained,
if trained at all, even in that—who know what they were
doing and take professional pride in this. Everybody knows how
you choose admissions tutors now: they are the people who run
slowest when the dean comes asking for a volunteer. They do not
really want to do it and they do it for a very short time, and
then you get another admissions tutor, because they have other
better things to do. I think "professionalisation" would
help.
Q21 Paul Holmes: You do find other
departments and other colleges saying, "We want control.
We want to have our own admissions tutors drawn from the sub-specialism
or the college." You talk about OFFA, but surely most of
your recommendations are purely recommendations and it is all
on whether people will adopt them.
Professor Schwartz: I agree with
what you are saying except we have asked the Government to review
how well people have adopted our recommendations in three years,
so at least they know someone is going to come and ask them. I
do not know how much power that will hold over people but, usually,
when you know someone is going to ask you, you will pay attention
to it. I do not know that you can build a whole system for the
whole of England around what happens at Oxford and Cambridge because
they are so unusual and their arrangements are so different from
every other university. In a way, they almost have to invent their
own because they really are quite unique in the way they operate.
But I did visit with all the admissions tutors at Cambridge, we
all sat around the table, and it appeared to me that they do co-operate
and they do certainly talk to each other and they do meet on a
regular basis and they do share information and practice and so
on. I think they are moving, if not to a centralised system, certainly
to a great deal of co-operation—which I think is a good
thing.
Q22 Paul Holmes: Finally, you were
saying the majority of predicted grades are wrong.
Professor Schwartz: About half
of them are wrong.
Q23 Paul Holmes: They tend to be
over-estimated rather than under-estimated.
Professor Schwartz: Correct.
Q24 Paul Holmes: Were you saying
there is a distinction then between private schools and state
schools, where the private schools over-estimate more than the
state schools?
Professor Schwartz: I probably
should not have said that because I do not have any evidence for
that. I think you will find people who understand the system will
over-estimate more than people who do not understand the system,
but that does not necessarily mean private or state.
Q25 Paul Holmes: We get politicians
who say that the problem with state schools is they do not push
their pupils, they are not ambitious and so on and so forth.
Professor Schwartz: That is right.
Q26 Paul Holmes: Yet, in my experience,
predicted grades tended to over-estimate, which would indicate
that they are being ambitious for their students rather than the
other way.
Professor Schwartz: The majority
of predicted grades are over-estimates, so I think most schools
understand that that would be more helpful to students. We would
obviously prefer them to be 100% accurate, but that is not the
system, and so we are working a system now with extremely unreliable
data. Probably the distinction is not so much private/public as
people who understand how it works and people who do not understand
how it works. I received a letter yesterday—and maybe a
copy was even sent to this Committee, as it was sent round to
quite a few people—from a father who was very distressed
because his daughter wanted to do a law course at one of the more
competitive law schools and nobody at her comprehensive had ever
told her that she had to do an examination and she had missed
the examination and is now not in the pool. Schools have responsibilities
here as well, do they not?—to keep up to date, to try to
find out what it is that universities require, to give proper
advice. One of the things I was told over and over again is that
schools are failing in that regard—or some schools are—and
they are not really keeping up with what is going on outside.
Q27 Paul Holmes: If there is a problem
with some of the advice that is given to students, and also, in
terms of it being electronic applications—although a lot
of that is happening in schools now—what about part-time
students and mature students, who may not have that same access
to electronic applications and advice from school-based tutors—
Professor Schwartz: We are aware
of that, and in our report we particularly mention that right
at the beginning: we need to do a lot more for part-time students.
They are kind of the lost people in this whole system and yet
they make up a great deal of the students who are studying in
universities in the country—not in our most selective universities,
where part-timers are very rare, but in most universities—and
they are left out of the system and even out of the top-up fee
system. So I think we do need to address them. It is a tricky
problem getting the information to people who do not have school
advisers or university advisers, I agree.
Q28 Paul Holmes: What do we do?
Professor Schwartz: It is very
difficult because they come from so many different places. One
of the things we have suggested is that we take another look at
the application form; for example, the personal statement. At
the moment students are asked to give a personal statement. If
you go to the right sort of school—and by that I do not
mean necessarily private, but a school with good advisers who
know what is going on—you will get help doing that and you
will write a good one. If you are a part-time student out there
with nobody to advise you, you will not know what to put in there.
We are suggesting that we scrap that and re-write it with prompts.
No longer does it simply say: "Give us a personal statement"
it actually says, "In this box we would like you to tell
us about the following things: Do you have any hobbies? Do you
have . . . "—in other words, guide them along. We think
we can redesign the UCAS application form to provide a lot of
the advice to everyone that now only some people are getting.
That would help them, I think, quite a bit.
Q29 Chairman: When we wrote our report
recommending post-qualification admissions, we said the implications
were a change in the school year, a change in university terms—a
very big shift. You are, in a sense, recommending it on the cheap.
Professor Schwartz: Correct.
Q30 Chairman: You are not changing
those big things; you are saying that it could all be done in
a tremendous rush in August.
Professor Schwartz: No. As I said
to Paul Holmes, we will do most of the work the way we do it now.
People will make their indicative applications, they will do their
auditions, they will provide all their information, and so on.
The only thing that happens in August is that those students who
suddenly find they have actually done way better than they were
predicted, have the opportunity to change and have one last application.
It basically means that a number of people will be given a chance
who are currently frozen out because of the way the system works.
For example, the guy who wound up being eligible for medical school
but was not able to apply.
Q31 Chairman: How do we know there
is going to be the flexibility in the high demand departments
and the high demand universities that they can accommodate a late
surge in applications?
Professor Schwartz: We will not
let them make offers until August. They have to save everything
up. All the work is done but nobody has made any contingent offers;
all offers are made after the marks come out.
Q32 Chairman: It's still a very tight
timetable.
Professor Schwartz: Obviously
there is a group looking at the implementation to see how possible
it is. I can only point out that that is actually the system in
Australia, and so it is not beyond the realm of possibility that
it could work. It is a big job, I think, changing from where we
are to where we want to be. If it is necessary to change the school
year a bit or the university year a bit, I think it would be worth
paying that price.
Q33 Chairman: How many universities
are there in Australia?
Professor Schwartz: How many?
It is a moving feast, like here, because they keep naming new
ones. Last I looked, about 40 or so.
Q34 Chairman: One-third of what we
have.
Professor Schwartz: I think we
are probably more than 120 now. There is a new one every day.
Q35 Chairman: I was trying to point
out that it is a larger population, there are more universities.
Professor Schwartz: I know, and
the system is not the same because theirs is very much more mechanical,
based mainly on marks and not on personal statements. So, yes,
we are looking at something different from what they do. The only
thing we would adopt from them is the two-stages, basically: the
application stage and then the ability to change. I do not know
whether it is practical or not. I think it is. We now have electronic
forms which speed up the process by about two and a half weeks,
and we do have, I think, good will. We have never yet seen a report
which did not recommend PQA. Because it is almost a nonsense to
recommend a system where 50% of the data are wrong and say, "Well,
let's do it that way," I think most people are in favour
of it, and I think there is enough good will and there are enough
ingenious people around to be able to manage it—but, you
are right, on the cheap. A two-stage system only addressing one
problem; that is, the students who get left out because they have
wound up doing better than they were predicted to do. That is
the only problem we are addressing in the two-stage process.
Q36 Chairman: We have just published
a report on admissions to school at 11, the secondary level. There
too you see a system where, if people are knowledgeable, better
educated, better networked, more mobile, they have a much greater
capacity to find the school that they particularly want for their
child and of course we have found a great deal of resistance,
from those people who get advantage out of it, to change the status
quo. In a sense we are picking up from your report that, although
you are making recommendations, you are being quite gentle with
the vested interests, who are not really going to be too obstructed
by the new procedures. They are still going to work the system,
are they not?
Professor Schwartz: There will
be people who always have advantages over other people. Is that
what you are asking me? When you say gentle to the vested interest,
could you be more specific? Which vested interest and how am I
more gentle to them?
Q37 Chairman: Those people who know
the system, are better connected, understand the university admissions
system, understand the complexity of the Oxford and Cambridge
individual college admissions procedures, that is still going
to be a system that is left pretty much intact.
Professor Schwartz: In my opening
remarks I said I did not think we would ever make the playing
field completely level; all we could do would be to tilt it down
a few degrees. That is what we are trying to do. I am not quite
sure what more we could have recommended that would have helped.
We tried to consider every possibility. We have to remember that
even if every single student who went to Oxford and Cambridge
was a "widening participation" student, we are still
only talking about a few thousand students. Those two universities
cannot do the whole job of changing the world. It needs to be
a much bigger, system-wide job, and the obsession with those two
universities is not very healthy, I think. It needs to be everybody
involved. I only say that because, whatever we do with them, they
can only do so much.
Q38 Chairman: We, in this Committee,
have said consistently in our reports that this unhealthy obsession
with just two universities is something we do not want to encourage.
Indeed, you are still going to get a very high demand in particular
departments, a very, very high demand—and I am thinking
here of the acting course at Manchester Met and of the music course
at Huddersfield, my own local university, which is enormously
oversubscribed. What difference will your proposals make? What
help will they give to parents and to admissions tutors who are
in the position of having several hundreds, if not thousands,
of applications for a finite number of places?
Professor Schwartz: There are
a number, I think. Before I answer that, could I go back to one
last point on PQA, if I may. The Department of Education, as well
as so many other groups, also had a PQA inquiry last year. As
part of that, they sent out questionnaires to universities asking
them what they thought about the possibility of a post-qualification
system. One very fascinating thing about that was that positive
responses came back from most Russell Group universities, including
Oxford, saying that they think PQA is the way to go. The negative
answers came from the new universities in the post-92, former
polytech sector, who almost universally said, "No, no, no,"
that they needed three months to select a student. This was pace
curious—and I was on that select committee, so I had a look—because
these are universities, remember, that take most of their students
through clearing and they make their decisions in three seconds
not three months. The universities asked their admissions officers
to reply to this questionnaire and these new universities all
claimed to take months and months. It was almost a kind of position
statement: "We are not really taking everybody, we are really
selective and we really go through an awful lot of work to take
these students and PQA would be a disaster," yet the really
selective universities, which do have thousands of applicants
and are trying very hard to select, were happy to go to PQA. That
is an interesting piece of politics I throw in there, that the
people who choose all their students in three minutes or a good
part of their students in three minutes during clearing are the
ones who claim to need three months. Anyway . . . I do not believe
them, frankly. I think they can do it in three minutes. In answer
to your question about competitive universities, every university
has competitive courses. As you pointed out, there are some in
the new sector as well. For those universities, we have tried
to give them a modus operandi. We have said, "Use
holistic assessment. Do not try to focus on one single indicator"—well,
they cannot do that as well: if they have so many students who
are all As, for example, they do have to use more than one indicator.
We think that is healthy. We have said, "Where everything
else is equal and you have a large number of highly qualified
students, it is useful and worthwhile for you to consider diversity
in your classroom"—and we said that because we think
there is an educational value in having diverse classes. "If
you have, for example"—as some of our universities
do—"hundreds and hundreds of qualified students, all
with all As, for 20 places in a course, it would be nice to see
whether you can choose some of the diverse candidates who have
those qualifications. Do not lower your standards, but within
those standards have a bit of diversity." We say that because
you do learn from other students: you do not just learn from professors,
you do not just learn from books, you learn from one another,
and some may argue that some of the most important lessons are
learned from having diverse classes. What do you learn from other
students? Communication skills, empathy, teamwork, getting along
with others, these are important lessons for a multicultural society.
So we have given them some advice. We have said, "Use holistic
assessment. Where you are not compromising your standards and
it is possible, go for diversity. There is an educational value
in that. If people are not successful, give them some sort of
feedback. For God's sake tell them why they are not successful,
so you do not have all these rumours circulating in the media
and all of these plots being pulled out." So we have made
a set of recommendations which we think will make the job easier
for them, but it is still a difficult job, I admit. Choosing students
from the many qualified ones is a very difficult job.
Chairman: Thank you. We are going to
move on to defining merit.
Q39 Jeff Ennis: Professor, could
I begin by looking at the issue of defining merit within the state
school sector. Previous witnesses have pointed out that the top
200 performing state schools in terms of academic achievement
have two common factors. First, they have an average of 5% of
students on free school meals, where the average across the country
is about 20%. You also have the top 200 performing schools with
the lowest percentage of students with special needs. If we compare
a student, say, in the top performing state school in the country
with someone in what might be described as a "bog standard"
comprehensive school, with 40-50%, say, of students on free school
meals and 20% of students with special educational needs, if they
both achieved the same A grade and the same mark in geography
A level, are those qualifications of equal merit?
Professor Schwartz: Do you give
more weight to the qualification of someone who had to struggle
through a poor school and got a good mark as opposed to someone
who went to a better school and perhaps had after-school tutoring
and parents who helped them? Do you want my personal answer? Obviously
I think it is a better sign, for someone who can struggle through
adversity, of their ability at least to continue working and put
their head down and do the job than for someone who had it more
easily. One of the things you can say in a holistic assessment
is that you can ask that question. As I said earlier, instead
of: "What is your personal statement?" how about: "What
was your schooling like? What sorts of challenges did you have
to overcome?" We can get that information and we can use
that information appropriately. I do think it is relevant. Interestingly,
I went to speak to a group of members of Parliament who call themselves
The Fair Admissions Group—Mr Clappison and his colleagues—and
they wanted to argue that only marks count and the only way to
be fair is to ignore what you have just said and just look at
the marks and the marks will tell you the answer. A mother who
wrote to us when we were doing the inquiry said that her daughter
had always done very well, had got all As on GCSEs and so on and
had always done extremely well at school, and when she was doing
her A levels her father died. For financial reasons, the family
had to sell the house, they had to move, her A levels were disrupted
and she did not do as well. I asked the group: "Would you
ignore that? Would you simply say, `That is irrelevant information'?"
They said, "Of course not. We are not inhuman; we would pay
attention to that." Once you have said you would pay attention
to something, then it just becomes a question of what things.
Clearly the schooling is important. I would think the context
in which the student worked is an important bit of information.
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