William Poole on the passion stirred by admissions

Before the students return I had a good bawl in the cloisters of my college, for on two sides there is reputed to be a good echo.

There are various echoes around Oxford: it used to be said that the gatehouses of Univ, Merton, and Queen’s all responded to a specific pitch; the hall staircase in Christ Church will sing back any note of the scale.

One of my favourite 17th-century Oxford scientists experimented with an echo out at Woodstock by seeing how much it would repeat back to him.

He managed to bellow one-and-a-half Ovidian hexameters on Echo the nymph, and she gave it all back.

This term I shall hear a familiar echo: ‘Admissions’ (‘… missions, missions’).

Nothing arouses passions like Oxbridge admissions! The echo is always about candidates’ backgrounds: gender? schooling? postcode?

Political nervousness rolls like mustard gas over the proceedings; prolier-than-thou witchfinders stoke their vegetarian fires.

A number of dons will continue to congratulate themselves for holding children responsible for the educational choices of their parents, ‘visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children’ — in this case the iniquity is usually that they paid for their education.

But most of us will keep our heads down, and wink at some shocking behaviour, including the fiddling of GCSE scores by school type — this really has to stop.

Across the university we spend a lot of money — many millions a year — on ‘Widening Access’, so we feel we have done our bit to encourage applicants from ‘all backgrounds’.

But what if the problem lies not in the candidates but in the education system itself?

If we continue to find ways of attracting the former without a matching interest in reforming the latter, then we simply perpetuate its own shortcomings.

‘Access’ is in theory an excellent thing; but in practice it can be upsetting, as candidates are encouraged to apply who just aren’t up to it, because the system is not up to it.

If you said this to state-school teachers a generation ago — my father was one — they would agree.

Say it now and it is usually interpreted as a personal insult, or called ‘elitist’, the fool’s criticism. What should we do?

Well, we can’t give up on ‘access’ initiatives, although we might try to align them with a programme of being more openly critical of state education — and more willing to offer to go into schools to see what we can do about it.

It is right for the tertiary system to take a keen interest in the goings-on of the secondary system; but when it comes to university admissions, the one thing we cannot do, or be told to do, is to cook the books, even if my best candidates turn out to be a line of lisping Ruperts.

The tertiary admissions system should rather act as a diagnostic of secondary health.

And if the test results are not good, then all the myriad doctors of this university should have the courage to tell it to their patients like it is.

If the government of the day threatens to punish this honesty, then we should part company.

William Poole is a tutor in English and a Fellow at New College