Teachers' reports on Ucas forms used to be the source of illicit fun, writes Maria Misra, but not any more
A-level results will be out soon and I shall be retrieving the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service forms for my up-coming first-years to refresh my memories of them from last December's interviews.
The Ucas forms are a great resource. Not merely repositories of factual information but, until recently, they were also a secret source of guilty pleasure for the jaded lecturer. In the past, the school report section of the form was confidential - the applicant having no access to it - and happily free of potential lawsuits, so schools could give the reader a truly candid glimpse of the person behind the paragon.
A certain wicked enjoyment could be derived from comparing the blithely self-flattering personal statement of the applicant with the mordant corrective of the school report. Even in recent years, the granting of candidates' right to read these profiles has not entirely destroyed this slightly illicit pastime. Indeed, for the hermeneutically inclined, reading the silences and decoding the euphemisms has become a challenging intellectual exercise.
But how reliable are school reports? Certainly there are many cases in history of hilarious pedagogical misdiagnosis. Einstein's school reports reveal that his teachers thought him a dullard, while Hitler's commended him for his moral conduct. Churchill's Harrow masters considered him lacking in purpose and unlikely to amount to anything, while Charlotte Bront 's instructor chastised her for her poor writing and grammar.
Generally though, the Ucas form, and especially the teacher's report, has been an enormously useful tool for university admissions. In theory, the increasing uniformity of students' results makes the teacher profile an even more valuable guide. It should proffer some kind of sense of the individual behind the glittering qualifications and a way of differentiating between what appear to be industrially produced paragons of pedagogical virtue. These profiles often reflect years of comparative experience - a much-needed check on the unguarded young university tutor, easily gulled by a fistful of A grades and a gushing personal statement from the applicant. And, on the whole, the schools' reports have been pretty accurate guides to students' potential and performance. One school of thought argues that teachers should be more fully involved in the interviewing and admissions process, so highly does it value their judgment. Indeed, moves are afoot in Oxford to place teachers on interviewing panels.
But my feeling is that recent changes in the legal and cultural environment of education have conspired to render teachers' reports not only less colourful but also less useful. Certainly, freedom of information laws that allow candidates to see their reports have made their contents much more cautious and bland. But perhaps more corrosive has been the stress on exam performance and test indicators. Increasingly held to account by these quantitative targets, teachers tend to focus narrowly on those qualities likely to lead to success in an examination and target-oriented world. This is completely understandable, but is it a good thing?
In my experience, the most rewarding students are often not the well-mannered, conscientious and malleable, but the prickly, difficult and challenging. The academy should still make room for the outre, but often more original, oddballs - at least for the Einsteins, if not the Hitlers.
Maria Misra is a lecturer in modern history at Oxford University.