To some people I will always be one of those children: one who went to boarding school and thus was given an unfair advantage in life; one who knows nothing of the real world; and one who, by not achieving the very top grades at A-level (A and 2 Bs, you see), is all but a waste of space.
To start with, I hated my school. The girls were horrid and had huge scary hair with no parting. The boys were chauvinistic hooligans who spoke of nothing but sex, rugby, sex and hockey. After doing my GCSEs, ‘getting into university’ became the most pressing item on the agenda. I had to write a CV – what can a 15-year old possibly put on their CV? – and begin thinking about what I wanted to do ‘when I grew up’. We were gradually being groomed for The Personal Statement. Our teachers and house-parents wrote our references: “…not afraid to call a spade a spade.” I definitely took this process for granted and can see how invaluable it is to have a ‘coach’, Oxbridge or no. I worked hard and I am an intelligent, capable and interested student, if you’ll pardon my immodesty. Just because my parents forked out a fortune for my tuition, it should not mean my application should already be tainted.
It seems that in order to compensate for the shortcomings in the education system as a whole, an impossible task is at hand for university admissions officers to give equal opportunities to all. According to the Sutton Trust’s September 2007 report, independent schools made up only 7% of total schools and represented 15% of A-level candidates. In 2007, LSE admitted 43% of its incoming first years from these select few. Yes, this is a huge discrepancy, but students with high A-Level results should not be punished for their achievements by not receiving placements at good institutions. As long as universities demand the very best grades and independent schools continue to provide the largest number of students with those top grades, of course this pool is going to be drained first. Furthermore, independent schools place more emphasis on what the government consider to be ‘economically important’ subjects such as Modern Foreign Languages and the sciences. Getting higher grades in core subjects such as these rather than in the less important subjects such as theatre studies, media studies and I.T. does carry more weight for university admissions. And at top institutions, these disciplines should not be sacrificed. It’s preposterous to put the burden on universities, even ignoring that they are businesses themselves after all. Universities should maybe consider alternative application methods; it is next to impossible task to interview all candidates and lowering grade requirements would only increase applications.
There is no easy solution here; greater institutional change is needed to allow educational social mobility, and this is something that should be on the conscience of independent schools, for it has been said that their existence creates a two-tiered educational system. Good teachers are leeched from the wider educational resources. It takes strong character to choose to teach at a school where children have lost the willingness or interestedness to learn and where resources are poor, rather than an institution with better services and resources and higher salaries. Attention needs be focussed on encouraging children in state schools to continue with education and to bring that education to parity with independent schools, rather than lowering the standards for those who are disadvantaged by the education system’s inadequacies.
Independent school students deserve to continue to fulfil their potential, not at the expense of state-educated students, but based on their individual merit, something for which – whether you believe it or not – they have had to work extremely hard.
[...] discrimination, or just a statement of how bad state schools are? These are three opinions (1, 2, and 3) [...]