Universities ‘given go ahead to favour state school pupils’

Graeme Paton in the Telegraph quoted the Sutton Trust in his coverage of a new HEFCE report on university admissions and attainment.

Universities will come under renewed pressure to discriminate in favour of teenagers from state schools after a major study showed they gained better degrees than peers educated in the private sector.

Research by the Government’s Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) showed that pupils recruited from the state system were more likely to graduate with a first or 2:1 – despite scoring the same A-level results at 18.

Some 76 per cent of state-educated pupils who left sixth-form with an A and two Bs went on to gain a good degree compared with 69 per cent of private school counterparts with the same results.

…

James Turner, director of programmes at the Sutton Trust, the social mobility charity, said: “HEFCE’s research confirms early Sutton Trust studies showing that when students from state schools get to university, they are likely to do well.

“Many of the world’s leading universities – in the UK, US and elsewhere – recognise that it is much harder to excel academically in some schools than others, and they use contextual admissions to help recruit bright students from less advantaged backgrounds.”

Read the full article here.