Opportunity Cymru

Ellie Decamp on the Trust’s support for Welsh students.

I’m half Welsh on my mother’s side. I’ve never lived in Wales but I used to spend school holidays in Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire, and my grandparents still slip into Welsh when they don’t want the rest of us to understand what they’re saying.

Welsh family stories abound. Taid (Welsh for grandfather) from Anglesey preached his first sermon as the new minister in Fishguard’s Baptist chapel on the day WWII broke out. My other great grandfather was a stonemason whose engravings can still be seen on coast path obelisks. And then there is legendary great aunt Emily, married to Titus George, who spent much of her life at sea trading on the Comlie Bank.

I support Wales in sports matches, which gets a funny look from friends and colleagues…

Let’s just say I’m proud of my Welsh roots.

Which was one of the reasons I was so pleased that new funding confirmed for the Sutton Trust’s UK summer schools has a Welsh focus.

We are delighted that the Oak Foundation has pledged $2 million to this programme over the next five years and we have committed to increase our efforts yet further to support young people from Wales to access leading universities in the UK.

Nearly a quarter of young people in Wales live in areas of low participation to higher education. And 2015 Pisa results show some of the poorest school results in the UK coming from Wales, including in science, reading, maths and also truancy.

Last year I was struck when we looked at the application data for our UK summer schools since 2007 and found that we had applicants from all 650 UK constituencies bar one – Anglesey.

Wales faces other significant barriers to social mobility, with the renowned difficulties of its ex-coal mining communities and rising unemployment rates in 16-24 year olds.

Sir Peter Lampl remembers vividly being surrounded by impressive Welsh peers when he was at university in Oxford. And this chimes with the stories of my grandparents and their peers in Fishguard – from fairly modest beginnings in a coastal town they went to university and became medics, teachers, ran insurance companies and set-up international schools.

When Sir Peter returned to his old Oxford College in the mid-90s he asked the then President, Keith Thomas – a Welshman himself – about current Welsh students and was alarmed when he found that there were none in the student body. Indeed, this revelation at Corpus was one of Sir Peter’s incentives to establish Sutton Trust summer schools at the university twenty years ago.

More recently, at the All-Party-Parliamentary-Group on social mobility before Christmas, Michael Sheen spoke candidly about the lack of opportunities for young people in his hometown of Port Talbot – the steelworks town which bred the likes of Richard Burton and Sir Anthony Hopkins. A reminder that talent can be found all over.

And we’ve seen that Welsh talent shine. At the beginning of the year we celebrated the success of 42 of our US programme students who won places at top American universities. Four of these brilliant young people were from Wales, and gained scholarships to Harvard and Yale, among others – read Morgan Cronin’s story here.

With the funding from the Oak Foundation we are increasing our efforts to reach those who most need our support in Wales. We are building a strong partnership with the Seren Network, a network of regional hubs in Wales designed to support bright young people to achieve their academic potential, and are working with Welsh MPs to increase awareness of the opportunities on Sutton Trust programmes.

As ever, it’s the partnerships that will pay-off to tackle the entrenched problems.

The deadline for applications to the programme in 2017 is Thursday 2^nd March (apply here).

It’s important that the Welsh don’t become the ‘rare-bit’ of the population at our leading universities.