Personality tests for would-be students

Higher education: New admissions criteria fuel 'positive discrimination' row

Students will have to undergo personality and aptitude tests under government proposals to give working-class children the opportunity to study at top universities.

Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, will set out the role of the new "access regulator" later this month, outlining the ways in which universities should broaden their admissions criteria.

Despite allegations, immediately denied, that some of the top universities were discriminating against pupils from fee-paying schools, Mr Clarke is determined that entry should not be decided by exam results alone.

The Government wants to encourage universities to seek talent from all social classes and all types of school, threatening to prevent them charging £3,000 top-up fees if they don't.

The document to be distributed to universities will include ideas drawn from business, including psychometric testing. Other ideas include using SAT tests, and a range of interviews, not all of them formal, to make sure young people from backgrounds that have not traditionally gone on to university get a fair chance to do so.

Tony Blair appeared to undermine that aim earlier this week when, as one Labour MP put it, he "pandered to the middle classes and the tabloid press" by insisting places must be given on merit.

A spokesman for Bristol University, which has been accused of discriminating against pupils from fee-paying schools, said the university would do all it can to widen participation. "We have no policy of positive discrimination. It is our policy to identify academic potential and we think that potential exists everywhere and it is our duty to seek it out."

He said that pupils from schools that performed badly at A-level with extraordinary predictions that fell short of straight As would be admitted. Evidence suggests they have been more likely to gain first-class degrees than private school counterparts with straight As at A-level.

Indeed the latest figures show that, though they account for just 7 per cent of the school population, pupils of fee-paying schools still take 39 per cent of the places at Britain's top universities. And all of the elite Russell Group of universities failed last year to meet benchmarks for the numbers of places that should go to state-school pupils if the Government's target of getting 50 per cent of all young people into university is to be met.

But Mr Clarke's aides were clear: "There is a determination to try and show there are different ways of hunting out the best talent.

"We are not saying people with worse qualifications should get in. But where else in this world is one kind of criterion the basis for entry? Would companies choose an employee on the basis of qualifications alone? Would you choose your life partner on the basis of their CV?"