Why Brampton Manor Academy State School 41 Oxbridge Offers is Nothing to Celebrate!

By: N_Walayat

The mainstream press has been busy today focused on how one London State school, Brampton Manor Academy has managed to achieve 41 offers of places at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, as though it is something to celebrate when the exact opposite is true! What about the hundreds of thousands of students from all of the other state schools? All this shows is how Oxbridge admissions are highly skewed towards those who know how to play the admissions system so as to engineer places into the Universities. Which is pretty much what the likes of the private schools have been doing for decades.

So, NO Brampton academy achieving 41 offers at Oxbridge is NOTHING CELEBRATE! The exact opposite is true! For it shows how little of Britain's state school talent actually makes it into Britain's top Universities which means they will not tend to churn out the best of Britain.

This follows a damning report a few weeks ago the fact that Cambridge and Oxford are only really for the very wealthy and foreign students. Which means the Universities are selecting from a very narrow gene pool of potential British talent, thus by virtue of which miss out on the best of from Britain's state schools and thus cannot produce the best of Britain.

Research by the Sutton Trust shows 8 leading private schools dominate Oxbridge admissions, as over a 3 year period they sent 1310 students to Oxbridge, more than the best applicants from 3000 state schools.

Whilst I am sure both Universities will state that any student can apply for a place at the Universities if they have the requisite A level grades, unfortunately the universities admission tests are designed to exclude the vast majority of ordinary British state school applicants for the fundamental reason that wealthy students attending private schools are coached by specialist teacher into how to sit and pass the admission tests and interviews. Similarly the Universities are eager attract full fee paying foreign students, who are similarly effectively fast tracked into the Universities.

Whilst ordinary students from the rest of the UK are basically left to their own devices to try and pass the admissions tests and interviews without any support. Which is why those who even make it to the interview stage have basically zero chance of actually getting into these elitist Universities.

Chris Millward at the Government the Office for Students, said the research shows "a clear and unacceptable gap in equality of opportunity for young people from different school backgrounds and regions."

Matt Waddup of University and College Union said “This report demonstrates that many talented youngsters will never get into some universities simply because nobody is pushing them to consider applying to them. Universities need to help students from backgrounds and schools that don’t traditionally apply to some universities by looking at contextual data.”

However, there are still plenty of good Universities out there for British students to attend then these that are focused on attracting the rich and foreign students, hence their vehement opposition to BrExit which is why one should take so called 'research' from these Universities on the consequences of BrExit with a mountain of salt.

Whilst I am sure the Universities will profess to have programs aimed at helping ordinary UK students gaining a place at the Universities, unfortunately these amount to little more than propaganda exercises to keep the plebs at bay.

The bottom line is that Oxford and Cambridge and a few others are skewed towards exclude ordinary British students through various mechanisms such as 'entrance' exams and interviews that ordinary students don't stand a hope in hells chance of passing unless like Brampton Academy they are coached and trained to pass.

Therefore if you are an ordinary British student, then please don't get your hopes up or waste your precious time trying to get into these Universities, because you stand virtually zero chance! Where Brampton Academy is an highly engineered aberration, for one state school cannot represent the pool of talent of 600,000 students! Instead all its done is to replicate to some extent what the private schools tend to do. The system is still fixed towards those who understand how the system works, which means 99% of state school applicants have ZERO chance of getting an offer at Oxbridge.

Nadeem Walayat

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk

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Nadeem Walayat has over 30 years experience of trading derivatives, portfolio management and analysing the financial markets, including one of few who both anticipated and Beat the 1987 Crash. Nadeem's forward looking analysis focuses on UK inflation, economy, interest rates and housing market. He is the author of five ebook's in the The Inflation Mega-Trend and Stocks Stealth Bull Market series that can be downloaded for Free.

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