Moritz-Heyman Scholarships press pack 4: Oxford University access

11 July 2012

The Moritz-Heyman Scholarship Programme gives visionary support to Oxford University’s aim of widening access.

Oxford is committed to ensuring the most talented students apply, get places, and take them up, regardless of socioeconomic circumstances, finances, family background, educational background, or anything else.

It is in the University’s own interests to attract as many good applicants as possible from every background, and then admit the very best.

• Oxford does not engage in social engineering: we remain committed to merit-based admissions, recruiting the most able in the subject for which they apply.
• Oxford University has put long and deep thought into widening access and made huge resource commitments to it.
• The distillation of this thought is the University’s 2012/13 Access Agreement with OFFA (the Office For Fair Access) – see below.
• There are huge disparities in school and even pre-school attainment in the UK - regionally, between schools, and between socioeconomic groups. These disparities start to show at a young age, as many reports on social mobility and access have noted (see for example the most recent All-Party Parliamentary Group on Social Mobility's interim report, '7 Key Truths About Social Mobility'; or research by MP Frank Field for the Independent Review on Poverty and Life Chances). Such disparities constrain the make-up of the student body of any academically selective university – so ultimately, widening access to top universities is a project for every part of society.
• The existing diversity of Oxford’s student body is, however, often underestimated. A third of all offers of places for 2012 are to applicants who come from backgrounds which are a target of Oxford’s widening access activities as identified in its Access Agreement; while around one in ten Oxford students come from households with incomes under £16,000, the threshold for free school meals. (Using actual free school meals figures to give a sense of this income group, as commentators often do, is very misleading: availability and take-up of free schools meals is low). A recent survey revealed that many state school teachers believe state-educated students at Oxford are in the minority; they are in fact in the majority. The University wants to ensure students do not have misconceptions about existing student body make-up, so is keen to emphasise these messages; but fully recognises that there is a long way to go.
  

Oxford’s access and outreach work focuses on:

Working with schools: The University has contact with 78% of all schools offering post-16 education.

Working with teachers: The University over the past several years has focussed an enormous amount of effort in working with teachers, allowing Oxford to help many cohorts of students via their teachers rather than individual students in any given year. Activities include a series of annual regional teachers' conferences; a one-day event for Oxford's own PGCE programme (run through Oxford’s school of education), which trains new teachers being sent mainly into comprehensive schools; and similar programmes working with Teach First participants.

Summer schools: Oxford for many years ran summer schools through the Sutton Trust, and in 2010 thanks to a major donation from the Helsington Foundation launched a new summer school called UNIQ – see below. Colleges also run summer school and outreach activities in addition to those run centrally.

Oxford’s Access Agreement

The Office for Fair Access (OFFA) is an independent public body with a remit to promote fair access to higher education. Their main role is approving and monitoring 'access agreements'. All English universities and colleges that are charging fees over £6,000 from 2012/13 have, as a condition of this, an 'access agreement' with OFFA.

Oxford’s Access Agreement sets out:

-Its guaranteed financial support package from 2012/13 (see enclosed sheet  “The University of Oxford’s standard student finance support package from 2012/13”);

-Its access targets;

-How it will aim to meet these targets through access and outreach activity.

The targets

1) Increasing the proportion of UK undergraduate students at Oxford from schools and colleges which historically have had limited progression to Oxford

2) Increasing the proportion of UK undergraduate students at Oxford from socio-economically disadvantaged areas

3) Increasing the proportion of UK undergraduate students at Oxford from neighbourhoods with low participation in higher education

4) Continuing to meet or exceed the HEFCE benchmark on disabled students at Oxford

More information on these targets on request

Meeting the targets

• We will focus on approaches that have a good track record, in particular summer schools and activities with teachers.
• Admissions will continue to be merit-based. We will not ‘positively discriminate’ or practise 'social engineering' to achieve these targets.

• Encouraging all students who can make a competitive application to do so
  
  • Continuing Oxford's extensive programme of over 1,500 outreach events a year
  • Increasing the collegiate University’s spend on outreach to over £2.8m a year
    
  • Communicating the exceptional value of an Oxford education and the extremely generous support available to lower-income students (now including the new Moritz-Heyman Scholarships)
    
    
• Supporting those students in making competitive applications that demonstrate their full potential and ability
  
  • Providing open information about how the selection process really works; online, in person, and in print
  • Working with teachers across a range of programmes (Regional Teachers' Conferences; Teach First; PGCE) so they can support  applications
  • Helping applicants explore their subject in greater depth, through summer schools and other programmes

• Ensuring that, in schools where top attainment is rare, the one person who does achieve top grades is not disadvantaged by their relative isolation
  
  • Working with the 2,300 schools and colleges where an average of 1-30 people get AAA at A-level any three-year period
  • Bringing bright students from under-represented backgrounds together on summer schools
    
    
• Increasing the UNIQ summer schools scheme
  
  • See below
    
    
• Supporting the lowest-income students financially
  
  • This includes Oxford's guaranteed financial support package and the new Moritz-Heyman Scholarships. See enclosed sheets “Moritz-Heyman Scholarship Programme: overview” and “The University of Oxford’s standard student finance support package from 2012/13”.
    
    
• Continuing to factor in recognised measures of disadvantage when shortlisting candidates for interview, in order to make a fuller assessment of true academic potential
  
  • Our selection process is one of the most rigorous and resource-intensive in the world. We aim to ensure that we identify potential as well as prior attainment.
  • Aptitude tests and interviews help to identify genuine aptitude rather that fact-learning or coaching.
  • We also use contextual data on applicants at the shortlisting stage to help identify strong potential in candidates that can be explored at interview (see enclosed sheet “The Oxford admissions system”)
    
    
• Supporting all students, especially those in target groups, while at Oxford
  
  • Increasing our spending on on-course support, including disability services and counselling services
  • Continuing to invest millions of pounds of the colleges' and University’s own money in the world-class tutorial system (the real cost of which is £16,000 per student, per year)
  • Offering close college communities with extra layers of welfare, financial and other support

Oxford’s UNIQ summer schools

Oxford’s flagship access scheme, the UNIQ Summer School, is going on right now and for the next five weeks (8 July-11 August).

• UNIQ takes students from UK state schools who have strong academic backgrounds and allows them to attend a free week-long summer school where they get a chance to study subjects in depth and learn what living and studying at Oxford is like through living in an Oxford college and attending tutorials in the subject of their choosing.
  
• The summer school started in 2010 with around 500 students and 20 subjects offered; this year will see 750 students attending, and by 2014 there will be 1,000 places available, and every undergraduate course will be offered at the summer school.
• In its first two years, UNIQ has shown impressive results: UNIQ students who apply to Oxford have enjoyed an average success rate of more than 40% - more than double the overall success rate for Oxford applicants. That means that of all UNIQ participants over two years, nearly 30% ended up with offers from Oxford.
• For UNIQ’s latest year (2011):
  657 people attended UNIQ
  444 (68%) went on to apply to Oxford
  185 (41% of those applying) received an offer from Oxford