Private schools and human capital

About eighteen months ago, I wrote a piece for TES entitled ‘How to prepare for Oxbridge like a private school‘. Private Education Policy Forum picked up on this, so I got in touch and offered to write a piece for them explaining why I thought that the private-school human capital advantage was really tricky to overcome. I’ve published a few pieces for them since, and as a result that first piece I wrote has been archived. I’ve reproduced it below in response to the recent news that admissions tests deadlines for Oxbridge are getting more stringent.

Daisy Christodoulou has written an excellent blog on admissions tests. Her argument is pedagogical: she says that academics are wrong to downplay the importance of ‘substantive…knowledge’ for success in these tests. My hunch is that they do this for one of two reasons. First, maybe they’re so deeply embedded within the cultural capital of their subject area that they don’t recognise their own unconscious competence (i.e. they can’t even conceive of not knowing what an ’empire’ or a ‘tribe’ looks like). Alternatively, well-educated people like academics might, as this paper outlines, want to downplay their own cultural capital in a bid to reach across social boundaries. This makes instinctive sense: if (amid a drive for more state-school students at top universities) an academic said ‘success in this exam is made considerably more likely if you have a wider body of knowledge than the syllabus demands’, they would be pilloried, because it smacks of elitism and plays into the hands of private-school kids with a wealth of resources at their fingertips. Clearly the academics are hoping that enthusiastic students from all walks of life will have gone away and read around their subjects to pick up ideas that might help them with admissions tests, but we know that teachers are much better at doing this for kids than kids are at doing it for themselves.

As a result, the unspoken implication of Daisy’s piece is that schools more likely to have seamless teaching and learning (i.e. ones with low staff turnover, outstanding behaviour and pastoral care, fantastic enrichment programmes and a long-standing culture of academic achievement) will find it easier to go beyond the syllabus in a way that facilitates admissions test success. Unsurprisingly, such schools tend to be private schools, grammar schools or state schools in exclusive catchment areas. Amid a gathering economic storm that will hit students and schools in the most deprived areas the hardest, these elite institutions will be the ones best placed to continue going beyond the curriculum, while teachers at less privileged institutions will be compelled to focus on more pressing concerns. The upshot is that admissions tests do remain a barrier to outstanding students in schools without the capacity to provide bespoke support, and that the problem is likely to get worse in the coming year.

The graduate problem: Oxbridge admissions, human capital and reform options

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When one looks at the websites of various schools from the independent and maintained sector, a striking pattern emerges: the schools most famed for their ability to propel pupils to Oxbridge offers seem to be the ones who make least noise about it. When a student from a middle-of-the-road community school or academy secures an offer, it will almost invariably be front and centre on the home page of their website, possibly with a link to a local newspaper’s awestruck account of the success. Look at the websites of Eton, St Paul’s, Westminster and Wycombe Abbey, though, and the tones are measured, even matter-of-fact: producing successful Oxbridge candidates is so routine for these schools that it warrants no greater emphasis than the school’s fencing salle or annual art trip to Venice.

This disparity offers a convenient way to understand the gaping divide between rates of Oxbridge acceptance in the private sector and the state sector. Even before we begin to consider the underlying demographic differences of students in these two groups, it is clear that the routine successes of the top independent schools create a positive feedback loop that engenders further success. By contrast, for the majority of state schools, Oxbridge success feels sporadic, even fortuitous, discouraging applications from strong candidates at struggling schools and making it harder for universities to perform successful, wide-reaching access work with the most deprived students. The key to minimising this disparity is to ensure that the one of the most potent resources private schools have at their disposal – human capital – is shared fairly across the independent and maintained sectors.

Ignoring for now the socio-economic gulf between the median student at a state school and an independent school, one enormous advantage that private school students have over their state counterparts is access to top-quality teachers. The Sutton Trust estimated in 2015 that private-school teachers are three times more likely to have a degree from Oxbridge than their state-sector colleagues, despite a rise in absolute terms in the number of Oxbridge-educated teachers in the state sector over the last two decades. These Oxbridge graduates provide not only subject expertise that extends far beyond even the most wide-ranging syllabus, but also familiarity with the admissions tests, interview questions and even the tutors that play such key roles in the Oxbridge admissions process. Independent schools frequently recruit graduates directly from Oxbridge to ensure they have up-to-the-minute insight into admissions procedures across a range of subjects that can be weaponised without the public-sector fetters of a formal teacher training route. This contemporary admissions acumen acts as a complement to the setting-specific pedagogy that private-sector teachers develop with experience. This complementary preparation approach creates a rolling stream of successful applicants, further boosting private school students’ appetite for (and disproportionate success in) the Oxbridge admissions process

While it is easy to understand why Oxbridge graduates might seek out private-sector teaching posts – lower staff-to-student ratios, better salaries, housing and lifestyle benefits and teaching people with whom they share a cultural milieu to name but a few – the reality is that this creates an adverse selection problem. The benefits of those teachers’ Oxbridge education, both in terms of their subject knowledge and in terms of their familiarity with the admissions process, are accruing to students who are already disproportionately likely to have been exposed to similarly well-educated role models.

In order to redress this imbalance of human capital, the two options available are to compel Oxbridge graduates into state-sector teaching, or to make it easy and compelling for private schools to share their human capital with state schools in need. The former option is an unrealistic proposition – any effort to make state teaching more attractive by comparison will either blunt the competitive edge of private schools in the labour market, resulting in sector-wide brain drain, or impose a hierarchy of trainee teachers within the state sector that smacks of Oxbridge-centric elitism. Sharing private-sector expertise, however, is a compelling option, particularly in light of the last year’s disruptions to education.

Although the shifts between virtual and in-person learning over the last year have been debilitating, one upside has been a new-found facility with virtual learning among students and teachers alike. One way to take advantage of this new digital agility would be to highlight shared university application resources as a way for private schools to demonstrate that they are providing public benefit in line with their status as charities. The expertise needed to write stellar references, craft eye-catching UCAS statements, negotiate admissions tests that act as screening thresholds for applicants and flourish at interview is disproportionately lodged within the private sector, but platforms such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams provide exciting opportunities to disseminate this human capital.

This is particularly significant now as universities begin to understand the effects of regional educational underachievement. At present, partnerships between state and private schools tend to be based on geographic proximity, but schools’ new-found willingness to take learning online surely provides an opportunity for state schools that are isolated from private-sector expertise to benefit from the concentration of human capital in London and the South East. Compelling schools to create such digital partnerships would fly in the face of the High Court’s judgement in 2011 that schools do not need to provide ‘prescriptive’ outlines of their public-benefit initiatives, so it would be a surprise to see it pursued as a policy option during this Parliament. That said, it would be interesting to see a Bill put before the House of Commons mandating that all private schools seek charity status with a view to providing public benefit and expanding their fee-assistance operations, with specified programmes of public benefit such as virtual state-private partnerships a compulsory corollary of that status. It is hard to see the overwhelmingly private-school Cabinet turning down the chance to provide their alma maters with substantial tax breaks, but with a Prime Minister in No10 who has made ‘levelling up’ the watchword of public policy, this tendency can be leveraged to create benefits that benefit the most disadvantaged in the scramble for Oxbridge offers.