University of Bristol admissions controversy

Widening participation is a government policy in the United Kingdom which attempts to widen access to higher education by increasing numbers of under-represented groups including ethnic minorities, disabled people and those from lower income families. Widening participation is a strategic aim of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the body which allocates funding to universities. The Bristol admissions dispute is one of two policial controversies over widening participation that occurred during the 2000s. In 2000 the Laura Spence Affair involved the rejection of a state school student who applied to study medicine at Oxford University and resulted in similar debate about widening participation. Bristol University first introduced a widening participation scheme in 1999 after the Dearing Report, a report which gave recommendations to the government on the expansion and funding of the British higher education system. Bristol's policy was in part a result of this report as well as being a principled attempt by the university to attract applications from state schools, something Bristol has traditionally struggled to do. The aims of the 1999 Participation Strategy were to: • Increase applications from students from under-represented groups • Put in place an admissions system to enable admissions tutors to identify and make offers to applicants from under-represented groups who have the potential to complete our programmes successfully, with the aim of increasing the number of entrants from such groups to Bristol was examined centrally before being passed to University Departments. Applications from schools where the average A-level grades were less than CCC were "flagged-up" to alert tutors to disadvantage. Bristol has been described as "one of the most competitive universities to get into". At the time of the controversy the university had the third highest private school intake (only Oxbridge was higher) with only 57% of students coming from state school backgrounds. This has led some to label it elitist. In 2003 it was reported that the university has 39,000 applicants for its 3,300 undergraduate places each year. In 2002 Bristol had 2,000 students were hunting 100 places in history, and 1,500 students of English chasing only 47 places, leading The Guardian to argue that many well qualified students would be disappointed. ==Boycott==

Accusations of bias were first made in 2002 when the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference stated that the admissions procedures for Bristol, Durham, London School of Economics, Manchester, UCL and Edinburgh should be examined for bias. The boycott of the university was announced on 4 March 2003 by the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference and the Girls' Schools Association who expressed concern that the admissions policy could lead to the "apparently arbitrary rejection of well-qualified candidates". In a joint statement they said: In these circumstances, we must send a clear message to Bristol. We cannot recommend to our colleagues that they should encourage young people to apply to Bristol until such time as the university can assure us that its procedures are fully documented, fair, objective, transparent and consistently applied. However, as it is students who decide which Universities to apply to it was not possible for private schools to prevent their students from applying to Bristol, the "boycott" amounted to discouraging their students applying there. The Telegraph described an academic boycott of this kind as "unprecedented". Among the rejected candidates cited as evidence of bias was Rudi Singh a student at King Edward's School. Singh was rejected from Bristol yet accepted to the University of Cambridge. Sushila Phillips, a student at Westminster School, was rejected from Bristol despite gaining a mark of 296 out of 300 in AS level English. Phillips later stated that she did not believe that she had been rejected because she attended Westminster School and that it was important that Bristol had control over its admissions system. ==Reaction==

University of Bristol The university denied any discrimination in the admissions process but reserved the right to take the educational background of students into account when assessing their A-level grades. In a written response to the Independent Schools Council, Vice-Chancellor Eric Thomas stated that the university did not operate a quota system for students from any particular school or social background: The university does not practice unfair discrimination, it [Bristol] does not operate quotas and it will continue to recruit exceptionally able students from all backgrounds through a selection process that is as fair and straightforward as we can make it. Pupils, not schools, make the decisions about which universities to apply to and we are confident that they will continue to want to study at Bristol. The university highlighted the fact that it is one of the most popular in the country with over 39,000 students for 3,000 places in 2002. Eric Thomas also emphasised the work the university was doing to "reach out" beyond the middle-classes. In a BBC interview he stated: a huge raft of initiatives have been implemented. Things like summer schools in which we bring students to the university during the summer to see it, we have relationships with local schools and further education colleges. and that the policy of making lower offers to exceptional students from state schools and disadvantaged backgrounds was not to satisfy the government or gain funding: There is no question of the University attempting to widen participation in order to gain Government cash. Bristol agreed its widening participation strategy in 1998 - long before widening participation became part of Government policy. Work in this field is resource-intensive and funding from the Government helps to cover the costs. The University is not motivated by money but by the desire to recruit the best students and by the recognition that if it is to act fairly and avoid missing out on some of the most able people, it must have regard to factors in addition to predicted A-level grades. However, residents of Wills Hall wrote letters to the newspaper defending the hall against accusations of classism. Head teachers The National Association of Head Teachers, a trade union which represents head teachers in the United Kingdom stated that the "HMC and GSA are guilty of gesture politics of the worst kind... They are merely shooting themselves in the foot by pursuing a boycott". The Daily Express stated "More students being turned down for being middle class". Politicians Prime Minister Tony Blair commented on the controversy, stating that university should grant places on the basis of merit rather than class. He added that he wanted to see more working-class people in higher education but was forced to backtrack from comments made by Margaret Hodge which argued that Universities such as Bristol should be set formal targets for widening access. He also stated that it would be inappropriate for government to become too involved in university admissions. The then Shadow Education Secretary Damian Green accused the government of trying to "fiddle admissions for political ends". Liberal Democrat MP Phil Willis said that "social engineering is coming ahead of merit and the development of talent." ==Resolution==

The controversy resulted in applications to Bristol falling for the first time in a decade in the 2004/05 admissions cycle. Application numbers fell by 5% although Bristol downplayed this attributing the decrease to random fluctuations in the level of applications. The boycott ended on 29 April 2003 when the chairman of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference expressed satisfaction with the admissions policy for Bristol. In 2005, the Independent Schools Council published a report which cleared Bristol of bias. The report surveyed applications by 20,000 private school pupils and found that in 60 of 300 courses surveyed 98% of private school pupils were offered a place. ==Subsequent developments==

In 2009 Bristol rejected giving a "head start" to applicants to disadvantaged backgrounds as part of a scheme proposed by Peter Mandelson. Statistics available from the Higher Education Statistics Agency published in 2008 show that Bristol's state intake stood at 63.1% a decrease from 65.1% the previous year. Data from 2009/2010 shows Bristol's intake from state schools and colleges to be 60.0% an identical figure to 2003 when the controversy over admissions occurred. In 2012 the university introduced a points based admissions system whereby poorer students “will be given an automatic weighting to their total academic score”. During the 2012/13 admissions cycle all undergraduate courses used some form of contextual data but the university has refused to state exactly how their scoring system works. ==Notes==