THE Government was told yesterday to "take its tanks off Oxford's lawns" and stop threatening it with financial penalties for failing to admit more pupils from state schools and poorer backgrounds.
Michael Beloff, the president of Trinity College, Oxford, which two years ago rejected an application from Tony Blair's eldest son, Euan, said the university owed its international standing to its insistence that academic merit was the only criterion for admission. "To alter our standards in pursuit of social or political rather than educational objectives would be a betrayal of what the university is for," he told the annual meeting of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, which represents 240 leading independent schools.
He said Oxford's determination to escape such pressures could lead it to become independent of the Government. That would be expensive, but the university was about to launch a major fundraising drive. "If we do become independent, every means must be used to ensure that we do not become merely a finishing school for the offspring of the rich, but honour the traditions of the founders of the colleges whose concern was imparting education and ideals to those with the capacity to absorb them," he said. Oxford still had no idea whether it would be allowed to charge tuition fees of £3,000 a year from 2006; nor had it been told which, if any, of the Government's targets it would be required to meet.
The real problem about widening access to leading universities was the failure of most state schools to offer their pupils the teaching and facilities that were available in the independent sector, Mr Beloff said. That was the Government's responsibility. The Government insisted that the cleverest pupils prospered as much in non-selective as in selective schools.
Mr Beloff said: "If you teach the intellectually outstanding and the intellectually more challenged together, you may benefit the latter but you will surely burden the former. Research has shown that bright working-class children inevitably do better in grammar than comprehensive schools, which is why destroying the grammar schools in the 1960s was such a terrible mistake."
The Government claimed that the growing success of pupils in public exams was a result of more diligent study and more dedicated teaching. But the truth was that "soft assessment" had been substituted for rigorous exams and multiple choice questions for essays. Pupils had turned away from learning foreign languages and the harder sciences and "joined up" history had been abandoned. Many universities were convinced that the academic ability of their students had declined in the past 10 years and that degrees had been devalued in consequence. That was why Oxford and Cambridge had to turn away 10,000 applicants a year, nearly all of whom were expected to achieve straight A grades at A-level. It was why the two universities wanted to see applicants' marks and not merely their grades and why they had introduced special tests.
Mr Beloff said: "By definition, an Oxford education is for the few not the many - an elite, to use a word which has only recently and wrongly achieved a pejorative penumbra." The barriers to attracting that elite included the prejudice of many state school teachers who considered Oxford and Cambridge "archaic; snobbish and unsympathetic to their charges" who discouraged their pupils from applying and politicians who falsely accused the two universities of tilting the scale against state school applicants.
There is no doubt that children from deprived backgrounds often fail to receive the education in this country that they deserve. Many state-school pupils are unable to maximise their chances of being accepted by Britain's top universities. And it is no secret that independent schools have the resources to coach their students in, say, flashy Oxbridge-interview techniques, or to cultivate a fizzing prose style that will catch the examiner's eye. As a result, many privately educated candidates have an innate and unfair advantage when filling out their UCAS forms. In this respect, Britain's meritocracy falls down.
But Michael Beloff, QC, the president of Trinity College, Oxford, was right to argue yesterday against a report issued by the Government last week; the one that bashed our leading universities for not taking enough state-school undergraduates. We can only sympathise with Mr Beloff's frustration at being told whom he may admit. Students must be selected according to brainpower, not background.
There may be a dearth of state-educated scholars at Britain's most prestigious academic institutions, but the tutors for admissions are not responsible. It isn't our universities that are inadequate, but our schools. Rather than seek to redress imaginary flaws in Britain's tertiary education, the Government must allow state schools the freedom enjoyed by private schools to select, stream and expel their pupils.
Mr Beloff was right to bemoan the way in which the Government has too readily blamed our best universities for its poor performance in education. He was also right to castigate as "arbitrary" Labour's plans to bundle half of the student-age population into higher education by 2010, irrespective of pure intelligence or intellectual achievement. Our only quibble is that when he addressed the Headmasters' Conference yesterday, Mr Beloff was preaching to the converted. In future, he must evangelise a wider audience that is less disposed to agree with him. We suggest that Mr Beloff would make a great speaker at the next NUT annual conference.