Hermione Eyre: What Oxbridge wants isn't class but brains

Dons have an added incentive not to offer places to applicants with the right school ties or accents

We learned this week that social mobility is "stalling" at an alarming rate within our education system. One statistic from the Sutton report made headlines: one-third of Oxbridge undergraduates come from a narrow pool of 100 schools. (No glittering prizes for guessing which type of schools these are. Four-fifths of them are fee-paying; a high proportion require tuck boxes.) More significantly, the report showed this pattern repeated itself over a wider field. Roughly 93 per cent of children are state educated, yet they still make up only just over half the intake of our 13 best-performing universities. Worrying stuff. So what are the reasons for this independent school stranglehold?

Many have been quick to point the finger at class prejudice within the Oxbridge admissions process. This is a tired old argument; I had thought it would not wash any more. But here it is, back with a vengeance. Browsing rolling news blogs yesterday, I found that the Sutton Trust findings had provoked this comment: "The ruling elite will always look after its own."

Now, bloggers are often cranky, but this was pernicious: a myth that, because it risks putting young people off even applying, actually does harm.

Oxbridge spends about £4m annually on programmes to encourage a more socially diverse cross-section of undergraduates. This money goes towards permanent "outreach" teams (there are 25 dedicated staff at Oxford) and a plethora of schemes with catchy names such as Aimhigher, Target Schools, Outreach, Geema (Group to Encourage Ethnic Minority Applications) and the student-run schemes such as OxAccess. They produce guides for parents and carers that are available in Bengali and Urdu. There is a drop-in "shop-front" in Oxford which is so keen to be accessible its name doesn't even have any capital letters: iadmissions. College websites and prospectuses are determinedly welcoming: "This is a college where you can be yourself..." The universities are trying. They really are.

The Oxford admissions system as I encountered it a few years ago was delicately constructed so as not to favour pupils who had been drilled in interview technique. At my college, Hertford, English literature applicants were given poems to read for an hour; the entire interview was then spent discussing these poems. The explicit aim was to test the applicants' understanding and their innate ear for language, not the depth of their learning or the skill of their teachers. It was a very good stab at testing an applicant's raw potential, rather than being taken in by any privilege they might have enjoyed.

The noxious idea about Oxbridge promulgated by that cranky blogger becomes even more ridiculous when you consider the Norrington Table. This sets the colleges in fierce academic competition with one another. Dons therefore have an added incentive not to offer places to the applicants with the right school ties or accents, but the better brains. It is often incompatible with their principles and politics to do otherwise.

These are dons, remember, not clubbable or worldly types. I remember a tutorial when my tutor asked if anyone had heard of Arthur Hugh Clough. "Yes!" I said. I had sat for years in chapel opposite that name carved on a memorial stone. "He went to my school!" I chirruped. Immediately, I felt like an idiot. My tutor, a man with a keen interest in Marxist theory, stared at me long and hard. Bloody public schools, he was probably thinking.

Tutors, in my experience, do not create an atmosphere that favours students from smart schools. Young people from less privileged backgrounds should not feel any concern that they will be discriminated against academically. Socially, there were some extravagantly posh people, yes, but they stood out as oddities.

Blame for the inequalities exposed by the Sutton report should not be heaped solely on the universities. The responsibility must lie in part with schools as well. Roughly a quarter of all A-levels go to independently educated students, and half of all so-called "serious" A-levels. This is not a statistic of which the Government should be proud. And yet the latest government recommendation – that all university applicants should declare their parents' level of education – again diverts our attention back to tutors rather than teachers.

It is a teacher that gives you the essential confidence to apply to a university, after all. Yet according to a 2004 study by the National Foundation for Educational Research, 42 per cent of 236 teachers from state-maintained schools thought the "social context" of Oxbridge "off-putting". If they are not careful, they will pass this shibboleth on to their students. The paradox is self-perpetuating: pupils from state schools do not apply because they are concerned it will be not their kind of place.

Hence it remains not their kind of place. Universities are defined by their pupils, owned by them for that brief period they are there. Go on, Oxbridge is yours for the taking.

h.eyre@independent.co.uk