Higher Education: Levelling the playing field

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Between 1791 and 1794, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge attended Cambridge University – a university to which he was remarkably ill suited. His Cambridge career ended following his enrolment in the King's Light Dragoons under the name Silias Tomkyn Comberbache, and his subsequent dismissal, recorded: "discharged S. T. Comberbache, Insane." Such were the days when "going up to Cambridge" was less a stepping stone to a career, than a rite of passage for the nation's intellectual elite. But for today's aspiring undergraduates, Cambridge, like any university, provides an opportunity for more than amusing feats of witty bravado.

For this reason, the news that Cambridge University is to drop the requirement that applicants submit a separate form ought to be treated, in a small way, as good news indeed. For last year's Cambridge intake to comprise of only 56 per cent students from state schools, compared to around 85 per cent across the whole of the Russel Group institutions (a figure considered low enough in itself) is clearly unacceptably disproportionate for a university which, in reality, sits in the same undergraduate market space as its competitors. Whether as a result of nagging from the government or a realisation that Oxbridge-calibre students from "middle ranking schools" are being advised by teachers against applying to the famous pair, the message out of Cambridge is clear: that the institution is to be considered by candidates alongside other top universities and not as an unreachable strata of higher education.

The move won't solve the problem of disproportionate admissions of state school pupils to top universities. There are clearly numerous barriers of inequality of opportunity still to overcome, though the pledge to offer full grants to those whose parents earn less than £25,000 is undoubtedly a positive one. But in dropping at least one of the hoops candidates must jump through, a first step has been taken towards clearing the fug of mystique which surrounds the Oxbridge application process. Let's now see Oxford follow suit. And let's put to bed the mutually exclusive Oxford or Cambridge system of application which sustains the aura of Oxbridge as the ancient sandbox for poets and politicians.

Now, who remembers the one about Lord Byron's pet bear?

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