A Bit More about Les Ebdon

We have noted that Les Ebdon of the UK government's Office of Fair Access has been lecturing leading universities about the need to admit more students from state schools. If not, they might lose their world class status and could also be fined and forced to charge much lower fees.

Specifically:

English universities will be expected to enrol thousands more undergraduates from working-class families and poor-performing state schools in return for the right to charge up to £9,000 in tuition fees, it emerged.

Prof Ebdon, newly-appointed director of the Office for Fair Access, suggested that one poor student should eventually be admitted for each candidate enlisted from the wealthiest 20 per cent of households.

Currently, the ratio stands at around one-to-seven, he said.

Speaking as he took up his role this week, Prof Ebdon said the country’s best universities were “not going to stay world class in a very competitive world unless they have access to the full pool of talent”

So if Oxford admits 42% of UK applicants from independent schools and they all come from wealthy households and if some of the state school applicants also come from wealthy households so that altogether about half are from privileged backgrounds, then it would presumably have to stop admitting anyone from the middle 60%.

If Ebdon gets his way then it is quite easy to see what will happen. Independent schools will simply arrange for their pupils to do a year at a carefully selected state school after A levels or the schools will open campuses in Ireland (or post-referendum Scotland) so that they can go into the international category.

Ebdon was the Vice Chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire, formerly the University of Luton, which some think is among the worse universities in England, This may be a little unfair: it is almost certainly a better university than Luton Town is a football team.

I wonder whether the next move will be for Ebdon to appointed sports fairness tsar so that he can start telling Manchester United and Liverpool to recruit more players from posh post codes or with more than than one GCSE. Otherwise they will, unlike Luton Town, lose their world class status.