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News of the latest salvo in a strange war between parents and the Government comes from Durham University, which has turned down a boy from St Paul's School with four A grades at A-level. He was rejected because his eight A* grades at GCSE were no more than average for his school, and Durham - on the basis of recommendations from the National Council for Educational Excellence, endorsed by ministers - requires pupils to outperform their school average.
Conscientious parents reckon their job is to get their children as good an education as possible. The Government takes the view that its job is to prevent some children from getting an advantage over others. While there are obviously limits to this - it does not send the police in to raid the houses of those parents caught reading to their children or feeding them Omega 3 supplements - it has been conducting a determined and inventive campaign to stop parents from securing their children places in good schools.
A recent example of this was the Government's neat counter-attack on those parents who thought they could sneak into good state schools by buying houses in their catchment areas. Many local authorities have cut them off at the flank by allocating places not on the basis of distance from school but randomly, by lottery. Ha! Got you!
Still, some schools remain a lot better than others. That's partly because no government has dared abolish independent schools and partly because state schools are of very variable quality. But now ministers have devised a cunning counter-counter-attack on those who have managed to evade its assaults on school admissions. They are using the high-quality secondary education that parents have been struggling to get for their children as a disqualification for high-quality tertiary education. In other words, the better the school you went to, the lower your chances of getting into a good university. Brilliant!
Faced with this Catch-22, some parents are taking extreme measures. A friend of mine whose clever, expensively educated daughter failed to get a place at a decent British university has turned to America. It takes tertiary education more seriously than we do, spending 2.7 per cent of its national income on its universities, compared with our 1.1 per cent; it has 13 of the world's top 20 universities, compared with our four; and its government does not try to prevent well-educated teenagers from going to good universities.
My friend's daughter now has a place at an Ivy League university. This escape route is not just for the very rich: top American universities run "needs-blind" admissions policies: rich successful applicants pay for themselves, poor ones go free.
If the Government's university-admissions policy ends up driving more clever children to study abroad, it will be a shame. Some will stay abroad, depriving their parents of their company and the country of their brains. But the biggest losers will be the universities, which will see the quality of their intake, and ultimately of their research and their teaching, decline. Universities that want to stop this happening should stop collaborating with the Government's campaign.
Movie lovers need fresh blood
Duplicity, Julia Roberts's new movie, is an entertaining comic thriller. The film peels away layer after layer of trickery to reveal a satisfying resolution of a complex plot. I just about kept up, and felt rather pleased with myself for it.
Less enjoyable was the rerun, for the nth time, of the transatlantic romance theme. Richard Curtis does it again and again (Four Weddings, Notting Hill); Emma Thompson is about to do it with Dustin Hoffman (Last Chance Harvey). I quite understand the commercial rationale: they have to appeal to both the British and the American markets. But I do rather long for our movie stars to have a wider range of romantic choices. Perhaps the growth of the Chinese and Indian markets means they'll soon be allowed to start dating people from those countries.
Barack the mystery man
Awarding Barack Obama the biography prize in the British Book Awards looks like nothing more than celebrity-struck bandwagonitis, but it isn't. Dreams from my Father is a wonderful book: a clear-eyed examination of race in America illustrated through the particular fusion of racial and cultural DNA that made Mr Obama the man he is.
Other leaders have written successful books — Disraeli produced pot-boiling novels and Winston Churchill wonderfully written pacy reportage and history — but I've never come across a successful politician whose writing revealed him to be quite so introspective and reflective, and I don't understand how so subtle and sensitive a man can have chosen such a bruising career. America's president is, in many ways, a mystery.
Reader views (8)
The same thing happens in the USA. Some colleges want the top 10% of a class or are more interested in valedictorians or salutatorians, but it may be harder to win those honors at high school X than at high school Y.
So here's a rotten plan that just might work: go to a great school for a few years, and at the last year, transfer to the worst one possible and cream the competition there. But isn't that just nasty?
- Liz, Pittsburgh, USA
My daughter applied to universities after she had her grades. She rang around a load of them to find out if there was any point in applying. She also had 8A*'s at GCSE and 3 A's at A level. A couple of them said that there wasn't any point (including Edinburgh). She eventually was accepted by Cambridge.
- Will, London
Wait until you see what an Ivy League university tuition cost a year! Harvard charges over $60,000 a year! That is 40k pounds! Way higher than Eton et al. That said quite frankly who cares about Durham anyway? At undergraduate level there are other options which might well be better anyway. Imperial College London is way better than Durham if you are studying the sciences. You get out of a University education what you put into it. In the USA there is a growing view that Ivy League undergraduate degrees are over rated and its better to go to a good State college for your first degree, get outstanding grades and then spend your money on a top post grad Ivy League school. One thing for sure if you go to a US university you work your tail off because the competition is ferocious.
- James Macleod Ritchie, Oyster Bay Cove
Of course this mad government punishes parents who sent their kids to good schools, it's a wasy for them to fill the awful comprehensives they have created with their ant-education policies.
- Kiwi Expat, London, UK
The boy with 8 A* grades who was rejected by Durham may feel disheartened, but the other side of the coin is that good grades are not the only criterion for judging university applicants. Anyone who applies to a US university will quickly discover that grades are only one relatively small part of the tedious application process which also includes SAT tests, interviews, references, an immaculate CV and several essays in a long application form. UK university applicants have long enjoyed a simple and straightforward standardized admissions process. Grade inflation and dumbing down of tests, more than class-war, will force British universities increasingly to look beyond grades for other indicators.
- Bloke, London
Mariza, London - ...how come? Because international (i.e. non-EU) students are big business and donate billions to Britain's economy every year, not just in terms of over-inflated international fees (in many cases for mediocre courses) but also by way of their living expenses such as rent, council tax, utilities, food, travel, etc. and payment of income tax and NI if they work during their studies. Having said that, I'd imagine that "high grade" students, whether home or international, are not applying to the same universities as the "mediocre" international or home student, and oversubscribed "old" universities such as Durham can afford to pick and choose the brightest and the best.
- Pat, East Kent UK
If this country wants to stop some bright kids from going to its best university there will be plenty of other countries that will welcome them. The chances are that the talent will then stay away. At the end of the day it will be Britain's loss.
- Anna, London
So how come mediocre students from Greece, etc, etc, secure entry into British universities, and high graders from inland cannot? There is something fishy ...
- Mariza, london
