Working with Oxfordbridge: is hard work enough?

1 Define the following terms and concepts referred to in the text:

outreach schemes

inner city (schools)

hallowed halls of Britain’s top universities

a comprehensive school

selective schools

league table

upper echelons of a profession

social mobility

Aimhigher

St Edmund Hall, Oxford

public school confidence

social and cultural capital

the crucial missing link in the social mobility chain

conspicuous wealth

freelance researcher

Russell Group universities

the social divide

2 Paraphrase the underlined bits in the sentences below, retaining full sentences.

1) Rebecca Creamer at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, says outreach should be targeted at schools
where applications to top universities are not normally considered.

2) … the many times when I felt – or was told – that the hallowed halls of Britain’s top
universities were not “for the likes of me”.
3) And then how I was so out of my depth at the interviews I was left feeling stupid and
inadequate. I may have been a bright, hardworking student, but unlike my equivalents at
private or selective schools, I wasn’t “groomed” to get into Oxbridge, and it showed.

4) That was 20 years ago. Just last year a report from the OECD showed that the UK today
performs poorly in an international league table showing how many disadvantaged pupils
succeed “against the odds” at school.

5) There may have been episodes of abject snobbery and the galling sight over over-
privileged hoorays sauntering around with their whiff of entitlement – the very thing that
almost put me off applying in the first place – but there was also a first-rate education, a
stimulating environment and the opportunity to mix and make friends with people from
right across the social spectrum.

6) Perhaps Michelle Obama’s speech resonated because it was 20 years ago this month that
I graduated.

7) For the last few weeks, I’ve been interviewing current Oxbridge students and graduates
from low-income backgrounds. First, I canvassed their views on access.

8) On access, the universities both do extensive work in this area, but our interviewees were
almost in total agreement: Oxbridge needs to do even more to reach out to children and
schools in deprived areas.

9)Everyone I spoke to was worried about the end of Aimhigher, the national scheme aimed
at raising university aspirations, which officially winds up next month.

10) Creamer says it doesn’t help that the universities defend themselves on access with a
false dichotomy between “private” versus “state” school ratios (both universities point out
that more than 50% of intake is now from state schools) rather than addressing the
discrepancies between inner-city or underrepresented schools and selective state and public
schools.