4 Calm before the storm

Once again, the Sutton Trust has produced a research report that has triggered public debate. In particular, the finding that a third of places at Oxbridge are given to pupils from only 100 schools, 80% of which are private. This short piece from the Guardian poses the question, ‘whose job is it, universities or government, to transform the educational chances of poor children?’ The two contributors, the universities minister John Denham, and Wendy Piatt, waltz through the current debate with no apparent animosity in this Guardian article
http://society.guardian.co.uk/socialexclusion/story/0,,2176286,00.html .

However, I think this mild mannered debate could get rather edgy rather rapidly. There is great unease in the Brown government that progress in reducing social disadvantage in the UK seems to be slow. The government are still committed to their very ambitious objective of ending child poverty by 2020, so there is real frustration that something as ‘easy’ as opening up higher education to the socially disadvantaged seems to be making little progress. Equally, on the basis of recent discussions I've had with some Aimhigher staff, they too are frustrated, but in their case because of what they see as government’s inability to stick to a consistent strategy or to let them get on with the job. Instead they find they have to cope with ever changing demands and guidelines. I predict this will come to a crunch next year, when schemes which cannot prove in detail that they are working with disadvantaged students, in the terms laid out by HEFCE, will suffer a ministerial biting. Remember, Gordon Brown only allowed himself one class struggle moment in the last 10 years, when he attacked Oxford University’s admissions procedures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Spence_Affair

As an end note, I notice that john Denham mentions that every secondary school is to have a higher education partnership and “We'll soon be setting out how formal partnerships through academies and trusts can be established.“