"Bring on Oxbridge quotas"

No, he was at Loughborough.

Quotas not needed. Working class kids do get offers from Cambridge, I'm one of them, just less of us apply.

*cough* fewer

*cough* fewer

I'm Scouse. We have our own language.

Isn't that right @CheeseIsVeg?

I'm Scouse. We have our own language.

I once saw an advert in a job centre window in Liverpool asking for a secretary to write "lerrers and documents".

I bet you'd like to bring back grammar schools, too...

No, he was at Loughborough.

For the archery?

That is only valid if candidates have not been trained to the test.

Performing dogs may sit up and beg on a prompt or salivate with food production (Pavlov), in exam circumstances equating to type of question equals stock trained response that has been drilled, that is not to say they are smarter than a dog that can, partly by intuition, herd sheep, gets the nuance when to chase when to lie etc.

The fact is the system is weak, partly I suspect because the public schools of the UK etc have geared themselves more to exam success (parents shelling out a lot of money now want results) , fewer Tim Nice But Dim's,and have raised their games.

In 1944 my father , the son of a soldier who started as a private in 1908 and worked his way up in the army, applied and was accepted to Oxford, (Queens), he came out of the Royal High, Edinburgh (fee paying) because he had won a bursary there out of an Edinburgh state primary.

Another who took a similar route from the same primary year was the now Lord Mackay of Clashfern , former Lord Chancellor, but back then James Mackay, son of a railway signalman, he got a bursary to George Heriots, albeit he did Edinburgh then Cambridge whereas my father did Oxford then Edinburgh.

At Oxford my father's best friend , who remained so for the rest of their lives, was a boy whose father had died, he had left school post A levels and apprenticed, to a law firm but then also got a bursary to Oxford (Lincoln) during the war, my fathers girlfriend at Oxford came from a Welsh mining village, again a non affluent family background.

Now it seems to me that somewhere along the line something has gone wrong, back in the 1940s lots of students at Oxford and Cambridge came from less affluent backgrounds, so maybe the secret is to go back in time and establish what made that era more egalitarian?

Maybe it was that working class families valued education more, appreciated it was the best route, maybe the only route, to real financial stability, parents possibly not having received a lengthy education (My grandparents left school at 14) placed a far higher value on it for their children.

Maybe it was the self improvement ethos out of the Labour party of the period that instilled a respect for education far more widely in society, that made learning and books available in the evenings and at weekends, for people to seek self improvement.

Oxford and Cambridge cannot change society, they can merely work within its structures, so maybe the real secret is to change how parents value education.

Back then and up to 1980’s, only about 20% of school kids proceeded to receive higher education (including polytechnics and other types of higher education post-schools) . Number of students who went to university is an even smaller portion among those 20%. ( if I remember correctly, it was something like 5% of all school children)
Now more than 40% goes to university. Though you can’t simply compare those differences between those periods as all politeques were upgraded to universities in mid-80’s by then PM John Major, still the fact remains the same that a much larger proportion of students proceed to universities than ever been, and, more importantly and on the contrary to your suggestion, a bigger improvement of proportion of students going to universities has been seen among students from less-privileged backgrounds.
So they’ve been doing something right, actually, though the improvement may not seem fast enough for some people.

Another thing that should not be forgotten is who is to pay for educating university students. In the olden days, the consecutive governments could afford to wholly support the uni students because they were so few of them and with the demography which is completely different from now = much bigger population of working/tax-paying people then vs ever-increasing population of OAPs with more increased needs of medical/social cares.
Though larger proportion of people go to universities these days than before, still about 60% of population do not. And they’re often with lower-income with much more strained on their budget. Is it fair to burden tax payers even more to pay for the privilege and benefits you are more likely to gain directly if you have a university degree? Just a small rise of tax rate hurt those people on lower income much more than people of higher income.

Probably some people with very leftist ideology may say ‘tax the rich people more!’, and that’s exactly what Labour Government did in 1970’s. And we all know what happened.....
I know how horrendously bad things were in Britain because of that as I was old enough then already to understand what’s happening in the world. And in many ways we are still paying for the damage of those dark ages even now, like lack/deterioration of arcane infrastructure, etc.
We really do not want to repeat that, ever.

there is no reason why Oxford & Cambridge should not open a few new colleges exclusively for students from the lowest attaining backgrounds. these could be sponsored by football clubs or clothing brands...

Without continuing to go off-topic, your comments on other threads make it very clear you have no interest in anything other than continuing the degradation of marginalised groups by ignoring the fundamental race issues at hand and perpetuating the equally damaging and racist approach of "colour blindness" by pretending that you don't see race at all and thus it is not an issue.

This is while using Western white standards as the metric to compare others and holding and furthering the view that deviation from this as being bad and the fault of those failing to live up to these standards - despite the fact that necessarily impossible to do so due to the entrenched racial dynamics of the country (and many others, albeit with different characteristics). Quotas are not bad because "sad little white child" can't get in because of them, quotas are bad because it doesn't do anything to help marginalised groups and merely sweeps the problem under the table.

Also if it wasn't clear, white people are not a marginalised group by any reason except being a member of another marginalised group - and even then these frequently flagrantly engage in casual racism, be it white women playing into the "men of colour as sexual aggressors", white gay men saying that it's "just a preference" to completely refuse to date black men and not acknowledge the damaging white Anglo-European beauty standards which are at best the cause of this and that these need to be unlearned, white working class people acting as those immigrants of colour are the reason they can't get a job.

For the record, I will abuse those who use their privileged position to abuse, or further the abuse of, marginalised people until my dying breath. You don't want that? Stop being a bigot, and I'll happily save my breath.

I’m sorry, but Universities like Oxford should be able to choose students themselves...I honestly can’t see them not wanting to choose the best students as it’s in their interest...however, the issue of equal education opportunities across classes is what could be addressed!

They choose the best students, but from a narrow selection and some of the time, that narrowness is either what they want, or the inevitable outcome of the system they help to maintain.

"1.5% of the offers made by Oxbridge were to black British students"

......Given that 5% of the population is black.....