Poor students need high standards

28 September 2008

...It is simply wrong for Labour ministers to claim that top universities are staffed by blinkered social snobs who do everything they can to keep out deserving pupils from state schools.

If pupils educated at comprehensives do not gain university places at a rate which corresponds to their numbers, there is only one explanation for it: the dismal failure of comprehensives to educate pupils properly.

The abolition of the grammar schools and their replacement by comprehensives is why the number of state school-educated pupils going to Oxford and Cambridge has actually gone down over the past four decades. The alleged snobbery of university teachers is not a factor because it is a figment of Labour ministers' imagination.

Until they accept that fact, those ministers are going to continue to fail the people they say they most want to help: intelligent pupils from poor backgrounds. 

Leading article, The Sunday Telegraph, 28 September 2008.