Falling off the map

The delays were so long, and the leaks so extensive, that the details of the Augar review of post-secondary education in England felt both overdue and familiar when it was finally released into the wild.

With Theresa May on her way out, the review emerged into policy purgatory, the only certainty being that the panel’s hope that the recommendations are adopted as a whole is as forlorn as Lord Browne’s was the last time around.

A political miasma clouds the road ahead, but it has been instructive to hear further education – which sits solidly at the heart of the Augar recommendations – mentioned more than once during the campaign to select the next prime minister, including by the front-runner Boris Johnson.

Consider this framing of the issue, suggested to me recently.

Imagine two 15-year-old girls who sit next to each other at a state school. One is predicted to get a string of A* grades at GCSE, the other a handful of passes if she’s lucky.

For the former, the road ahead is lit up with industrial grade spotlights. It is obvious what she should do to succeed: take A levels, then go to university – most likely a selective one with ivy on the walls.

From there, she has the keys to the kingdom.

For the second girl, however, the route ahead is lost in an even murkier fog than the one politicians are currently stumbling through.

What should she do next? This young woman is the one that needs clarity most, the one who needs to be shown the path to a future that will offer her more, perhaps, than her past. Without it, her chances of developing into a productive, happy and engaged member of society diminish.

At the moment, the system fails to provide that clarity, and what the Augar review got most right is the sense that this must be fixed as a priority.

While the road to university is better mapped, there remain potholes that throw people off course, and at the elite end it is still too often deserving candidates from non-traditional backgrounds who fall by the wayside.

It often takes real examples to get a proper sense of the factors at play, and just such a case was set out by David Lammy, MP for Tottenham and a former higher education minister, at the recent Times Higher Education Teaching Excellence Summit in Canada.

Lammy has been a fierce critic of the University of Oxford in particular over its failure to admit a more diverse student body, and told a story about one of his own constituents, a high-achieving Ghanaian teenager.

“Everyone in the community thought this girl was outstanding,” he said. “Everyone in the Ghanaian African community in London expected her to go to Oxford. She gets the interview. Half the family go to Oxford with her. She has the interview. She doesn’t get in.

“The tutor communicates: ‘Look, you were good, you were strong, but we felt that if you needed to bring your whole family with you, would you really fit into this environment?’

“The father was distraught that he had ruined his daughter’s chances. He said to me, ‘I don’t know what we were thinking, Mr Lammy. We took cousins. We were eating out of Tupperware. I forgot these Brits, they send their kids away at aged seven, they don’t go with them.’ That’s the kind of mind-bending that we’ve still got.”

The tale was a reminder that while the path to higher education is mapped out for some, it isn’t clearly marked for all, even if they have the grades.

It is a reminder that for all the good intentions – and I don’t doubt them, on the whole – there remains a calcified understanding of what a student looks like, and what success looks like, that lets down those from backgrounds less familiar to the gatekeepers and the status quo.

As with Augar’s focus on further education, the important point is that post-secondary education has to work for everyone, including – and perhaps especially – those without the natural advantages.

john.gill@timeshighereducation.com