Cambridge admissions chief rejects 'social engineering'

Source: telegraph.co.uk

He insisted that grades achieved at A-level were the best gage of pupils’ suitability for courses at Cambridge, irrespective of school-type or social background.

Speaking just days after taking up the role, Dr Sewell warned against attempting to ensure society was “exactly mirrored” at the university and rejected calls to expand Cambridge’s student body.

The comments appear at odds with those made by Prof Les Ebdon, the Government’s new higher education access tsar.

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He said last week that elite universities should set more “challenging targets” to admit students from disadvantaged backgrounds and consider the social and educational “context” in which A-level results are achieved during the admissions process.

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Prof Ebdon also backed the use of “contextual data”, which is often employed to make lower-grade offers to applicants from poor performing state schools – effectively compensating for inferior teaching.

But in an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Dr Sewell rejected the approach and insisted Cambridge could not be pushed into “any artificial benchmarking”.

“We would be worried about admitting students who have achieved below our standard offer because the research we have done suggests that students who achieve relatively modestly… are more likely to struggle academically at Cambridge than students who have achieved better across their range of three A-level subjects,” he said.

“We would worry that simply dropping the grades might actually be detrimental to the life chances of the person for whom we did it. We’re not doing them a favour if they come here and struggle.”