Cambridge rejects call for universities to admit poorer students with lower grades

Cambridge has stepped into the row over "social engineering" in universities by rejecting calls to admit poorer students with lower grades.

The university said it would resist pressure to make "adjusted offers" to working-class candidates.

The institution's outgoing admissions director even warned that such a move would be a "cruel experiment that could ruin lives".

Geoff Parks, who has led the Cambridge admissions office for the past ten years, said that students who have failed to achieve top A-level results could flounder in the academic hot house of the university and be doomed to failure.

His comments come in response to the growing pressure on elite universities to take action to widen their social mix, with Professor Les Ebdon taking up his post last week as head of the university admissions regulator, Offa.

In his first week in the job he threw down the gauntlet to leading universities, insisting they should aim to admit more equal numbers of students from better-off and worse-off families.

Professor Ebdon said that the practice of giving preferential offers to sixth formers from poorer backgrounds "should be used where it's based on sound research".

He praised universities that accepted students from struggling comprehensives with lower A-level grades than it would ask of candidates from high-achieving schools.

"Context has to be taken in to account if you are going to access potential," he said.

Opposition to adjusted offers has been led by Reading University, whose vice-chancellor Sir David Bell, the former permanent secretary at the Department of Education, said earlier this year that admitting working-class students with lower A-level grades than their middle-class counterparts was "patronising" and could be seen as a "back door route in".

Applicants to Cambridge this year were typically required to achieve A-level grades of A*AA. Dr Parks, who stood down this month, said there was no justification for going down the "lower offer route".

"Our bottom line would be that it actually would be a really, really cruel experiment to take a bunch of students and hypothesise that they have what it takes to thrive at Cambridge and then see them fail because they don't," he told The Sunday Telegraph.

"We have very high standards within the university and we do fail students in exams.

"A student admitted to Cambridge will be supported enormously, with dedication and care, but nevertheless they still have to be up to the standard required of our students. If they can't cope, the outcome is they fail.

"Our research indicates that our current offer levels are about right for our courses. None of us in good conscience want to be ruining people's lives on some gut feel or political imperative based around getting votes or pandering to some particular bit of the populace."

Currently the university draws 59 per cent of its intake from the state sector, compared to nearly 89 per cent across all UK higher education. The target set in the university's access agreement with Offa is 61 to 63 per cent.

Professor Ebdon has warned that universities which fail to "achieve the outcomes they promise" could lose the right to charge £9,000 fees or face fines.

He said last night that it was for universities to set their own admissions criteria but Offa wanted to see institutions set "challenging targets" in their access agreements.

Around one in six universities in a recent survey said they made "adjusted offers" to some groups of applicants based on "contextual data" about their background, such as the quality of the school they attended and where they live.

Bristol, Newcastle, Nottingham and Glasgow, among others, allow admission tutors to make lower offers to some candidates.

Bristol's admission policy is based on research, described by Professor Ebdon as "very compelling", which shows that state school sixth formers admitted with one grade lower than their independent school counterparts did just as well in their final degrees.

Pressure has been building to halt the middle-class dominance of higher education.

David Willetts, the universities minister, backs the practise of having lower entry requirements for students from poorly performing schools and deprived neighbourhoods.

In a speech earlier this year, he called for a "renewed push to ensure that universities are broadening participation and improving access" as a pay-off for allowing institutions to charge up to £9,000 in tuition fees this year.

"Admissions can be based on more than just A-level results, by looking at all the information that indicates the potential of an individual to succeed," he said.

Alan Milburn, the government's social mobility tzar and former Labour minister, has said the use of "contextual data" in admissions should become "the norm not the exception".

Apart from accepting lower grades, some universities help students from poorer families by sifting applications using a points system which makes it more likely they will be offered places.

At Edinburgh University, for example, all candidates are given a numerical score to determine who will be offered a place.

The points system takes into account both predicted A-level grade and social background, with the extra points for a disadvantaged background enough to boost a pupil predicted three B grades above that of one predicted three A*s.