Lord Mandelson, the UK's Business Secretary, is drawing up plans to overhaul university entry that could see applicants from poor families awarded a two-grade "head start" over better-off candidates. He sees such changes not as positive discrimination but as a policy at the heart of Labour's drive to improve social mobility in Britain. He does not have the power to force the universities to change their admissions policies, but official guidance would raise the pressure on them to widen access.
In a similar vein, a recent MPs' report stated that Ministers should require institutions to take "contextual factors" in to account in their admissions. It also said that the need to ensure "fair access" was more important than the autonomy of publicly funded universities. MPs also recommended that the current "unfit" system for regulating standards in universities be replaced by Ofsted-style inspections which would target poor teaching and grade inflation in degrees.
Campaigners have welcomed the idea, with Les Ebdon, of university think tank Million+, saying that it was important to widen the social mix in universities.
However critics said the onus should be on schools to produce better candidates and added that the idea was unfair. Tim Hands, master of Magdalen college school, Oxford, and co-chairman of the main independent schools' universities committee, said education should be an "engine of social mobility", but warned: "If Mandelson is proposing to exert political pressure on university admissions and if he is going to be discriminating by type generically, everyone should be opposed."
In a speech two weeks ago, Mandelson warned that he was going to "turn up the spotlight" on university admissions, particularly at Cambridge, Oxford and other highly ranked institutions.
"Why are we still making only limited progress in widening access to young people from poorer backgrounds?" he asked.
Kenton Lewis, head of widening participation at St George's medical school, London, said: "We are involved in discussions with the Department for Business. [National] guidance on how differential grades could be employed would be extremely positive."
St George's programme has helped it to raise the proportion of its students coming from state schools from 48% to 71.2% since 1997.
"St George's can do it. Why can't everyone else?" said one official involved in the discussions.
The standard offer for medicine courses is three As at A-level, but candidates can receive offers of two Bs and a C if they outperform their school average by 60%. This favours bright pupils at low-performing schools.
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Telegraph columnist notes:] Discrimination against independent-school applicants (many of whose parents, like myself, face a struggle to pay fees) and against hard-working students from state schools who achieve the right grades is clearly unjust because all their hard work will be made to seem irrelevant. High-performing, middle-class students are at a disadvantage when applying to top universities, such as Edinburgh, because of repeated attempts at "social engineering", using candidates' postcodes as part of the application process. So even without Lord Mandelson's latest initiative, the number of students from poorer backgrounds is slowly increasing. The solution to a fair system of entry for higher education is to raise academic standards in all schools, including "bog-standard" comprehensives.
Poor pupils to have lower university entrance requirements
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