Last Year’s Oxbridge Intake

Part of 3. 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 2:38 pm on 25 October 2017.

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Photo of Alun Davies Alun Davies Labour 2:38, 25 October 2017

I’ll say this to the Member: Jesus College Oxford took a group of Welsh students to Oxford in the summer, to a summer school, and spent considerable time talking with them. Over 2,000 people are now a part of the Seren network and are benefiting from all the advantages that that has given to them. It enables them to understand the processes needed to apply for and to gain a place in one of these colleges. And let me say this as well: both Oxford and Cambridge are participating well in that, and none of the issues that have been raised by the Member this afternoon have been raised by those universities in terms of their engagement. However, there is a context to this. It is clear that if you are white, if you are middle-class, if you are privately educated and from the south-east of England, then you have a better opportunity to study at these universities. And that is unfair and it is wrong. It is due to the biases in admission and processes within the system, and that needs to change. It is no accident, Deputy Presiding Officer, that, in 2015, 10 Oxford colleges did not admit a single British black student—not one—whereas in Harvard over half their intake today is non-white.