The Prime Minister is right to blast Oxford’s minority ethnic intake

How important is ethnic representation at Oxford and Cambridge? Well, 11 out of the 16 Government Cabinet members attended these world leading academic institutions, including the Prime Minister David Cameron and Chancellor George Osborne.

All the Labour party candidates standing in last year’s leadership election were Oxbridge educated. It’s not just in politics where a good and prestigious  education matters, those who reach high office in banking, law, the media, and medicine all have disproportionately high numbers from these two institutions.

The Prime Minister’s remarks that Oxford’s intake of one African Caribbean student is a ‘disgrace’, is not only an indictment of this  institution, but also our wider education system.

On one side of the equation we see enormous privilege: Fee paying schools such as Eton, Windsor, and Wimbledon offer their children unparalleled advantage. This is juxtaposed with gross disadvantage; schools that literally cannot afford new books, have large classes, a high turnover of teachers, and are in economically poor areas.

Too many Black families live in these disadvantaged environments. As a result of this disparity two children with the same aspirations and innate ability from two different backgrounds will have very different educational outcomes. Worse still our pseudo meritocratic society will then say, ‘well, one has worked harder or has more ability than the other. It has nothing to do with race or privilege’.

If we accept the idea of a middle and upper class, superior gene is rubbish, then we need to find a way that allows us to measure the learning capacity of an individual.

That way excellence and even genius can be measured beyond the crude exam forms that we use at present. For example, a child with all life advantages may not be smarter than the council house kid. The question is how do we test it?

Lastly, the educational debate should move away from the narrative of ‘giving special favours to Black or poorer students’, to articulating the need to tap into a rich seam of excellence that is too often ignored.

As a result of this change society as a whole will benefit because we broaden the talent pool. Furthermore, we will never have an equitable democracy or fully vibrant businesses until we move away from affording a lot of power to those who have had an upbringing from a very limited privileged world view.

Simon Woolley

Picture: Black students