The law of unintended consequences

I am following up on the universities which Alison Sauer suggested might take young people lacking any GCSEs or A levels. All want the enquiry in writing, none, when I spoke to them, seemed actually knew of any such children. I shall report back when they answer the written enquiries. In the meantime, I want to look at the idea of 'widening access' to universities, especially the prestigious ones like the Russell Group and how this actually has the effect of making it harder for home educated children to get a place.

The law of unintended consequences is the idea that intervening in any complex system will invariably produce surprising and often unwanted results. How does this relate to widening access to good universities and the question of home educated children? At one time and not so long ago either, admission to universities like Oxford and Cambridge was not a straightforward and open process. It was, for instance, an advantage if your father had been there and was remembered. There was a bias in favour of the upper classes, in favour of white men, those who spoke well, those whose grandfathers might have made a large donation to a college; that sort of thing. This gradually came to be seen as undesirable, discriminating as it did against women, ethnic minorities and working class candidates. It wasn't bad for home educated children though, because this kind of atmosphere, letting a somebody become a student just because he seemed the right sort of fellow, made it possible to be very flexible about entrance qualifications. In fact a number of home educated kids got to such universities by precisely this nod and a wink process.

How very different is the situation now. Every decision, even which candidates are called for interview in the first place, is covered by a rigorous code and must be transparent and fair to everybody. There must also be a written record of the reasosn for decisions about admissions. This of course means that there is much less leeway for the authorities at the university to be flexible about admissions. For instance, they might be presented with a home educated teenager who is fantastically talented but has no formal qualifications. Perhaps they wish to offer him a place, but hang on a moment! How can we be sure that this is not being done just because he is white and his parents very well spoken? This is the same reasoning which has made it unlawful for secondary schools to rely upon interviews when offering places.

A number of universities now have official policies for widening access, trying to get in students who are not the sort who traditionally go to places like Oxford and Cambridge. This might seem brilliant for home educated children; in fact it literally guarantees that they cannot get in via this route. Oxford for example is fairly typical and we shall look at how their system works. They encourage atypical students by the use of what is known as contextual data. (This is known in the Conservative press as 'social engineering') There are five criteria, and if you fulfil three you are guaranteed an interview and favourable treatment. The criteria are; being a looked after child, attending a school with poor GCSE results, attending a school with poor A level results, having taken part in a Sutton Trust Summer School and having a level four or five ACORN post code. It will be seen at once that it is impossible for home educated children to fulfil three of these conditions. The question relating to the schools concerns the school which they currently attend. In other words, if they are not attending a school, these do not apply. To get onto a Sutton trust Summer School, you must be a state school pupil, otherwise you are not eligible. And very few looked after children are likely to be home educated. So it is quite literally impossible for a home educated child to benefit from this initiative.

This then is the law of unintended consequences in action. An initiative specifically designed to allow the universities to take teenagers who would be unlikely otherwise to attend, is so structured as to prohibit home educated children from benefiting from it! The same process, to make the playing field even, also means that a list of qualifications equivalent to three A levels has been drawn up and is unlikely in the extreme to be deviated from. So the Pre-U is acceptable, as is the IB and a variety of foreign qualifications. The only hope for a home educated child might be having completed the first year of a Bachelor's degree at another university. I don't know what that would amount to in OU points; about 120 I should say offhand.