Lies, damned lies - and Laura Spence

We are now in the third week of fallout from the War of Laura Spence's Rejection. The story of old-school-tie bias at elite universities refuses to go away. Durham and Newcastle have been tarred with the elitist brush along with Oxford and Cambridge. The universities have fought back - but so has an unrepentant Gordon Brown and yesterday the Prime Minister joined the fray, albeit more cautiously. Government sources are making it clear that the message of the forthcoming comprehensive spending review will be "Opportunities for All" - a general attack on privilege and the forces of conservatism.

We are now in the third week of fallout from the War of Laura Spence's Rejection. The story of old-school-tie bias at elite universities refuses to go away. Durham and Newcastle have been tarred with the elitist brush along with Oxford and Cambridge. The universities have fought back - but so has an unrepentant Gordon Brown and yesterday the Prime Minister joined the fray, albeit more cautiously. Government sources are making it clear that the message of the forthcoming comprehensive spending review will be "Opportunities for All" - a general attack on privilege and the forces of conservatism.

The row has touched an intensely raw nerve because some of the facts are discomforting. Only 7 per cent of pupils attend private schools but fee-paying students make up almost a half of the population at Oxbridge. Can that be fair, ask the government sources? More to the point, how can it be efficient for the nation's premier universities to be trawling from such a tiny pond?

But the issue is fiendishly complicated. As any social scientist knows, educational performance depends on many factors - genes are only part of it. Parents are crucial. So is family income, schooling, friends, whether your walls are lined with books and whether you talk about issues round the supper table. Declining confidence in state schooling since the abolition of grammar and direct grant schools has boosted the numbers going to independent schools. And independently educated pupils do better at A-level than state school pupils. That's to be expected given the majority of independent schools are academically selective.

So, Oxford dons throw some uncomfortable facts back. The proportions of state and independent school pupils gaining entry to the top universities is in line with their results at A-level: 44 per cent of those with three As come from the 7 per cent of independent school pupils, and 56 per cent come from the 93 per cent of state pupils. These figures are disputed. The Department for Education and Employment says the ratio is more like 35:65 because Oxford's figures don't include further education and sixth-form college students.

There is widespread anger in higher education circles that the Chancellor of the Exchequer played fast and loose with the facts of Laura's case and the truth over university admissions. There is also profound resentment that higher education is being used as a political football. The universities are determined not to be painted as bastions of ancient privilege.

Anthony Smith, the president of Magdalen College, which turned down Laura Spence for a medical place, is incandescent with rage. "Gordon Brown's behaviour has been disgraceful," he says. "He launches an attack on a named institution and includes named individuals without checking a single fact. When these facts are corrected and he can see they have been corrected, he doesn't apologise, he just goes on. It's appalling."

Professor Alan Ryan, the warden of New College Oxford, is similarly incensed, particularly as Oxford colleges have been trying hard to encourage state school applicants to apply. "In my opinion Gordon Brown is a fibber and a hypocrite and a bully," he says. "He was talking out of his backside and that's a bad thing for a government minister to do."

Academics from redbrick universities, such as Professor Alan Smithers of Liverpool University, are profoundly uneasy at the pressure being put on the top universities to exercise positive discrimination in favour of pupils from state schools. "It means you are not dealing with the individual as such but with that person as a member of a category," he says. "It's almost a kind of fascism. Making judgements about the capabilities of students is rather difficult and has to be conducted honestly and dispassionately. If you have these pressures you will make the system less fair than it would be otherwise."

Most higher education experts are convinced that Magdalen College made a perfectly reasonable decision in the case of Laura Spence. It had only five places to fill from the 25 getting through to interview stage. These five included women, ethnic minorities and students from state schools. Laura, with her 10 A-starred GCSEs, was a clever girl. After Harvard she hopes to go to Cambridge to do biomedical research. Contrary to what ministers have suggested, she performed well at interview but not in all the other aspects of Magdalen's admissions procedure - such as a discussion and a written test. Moreover, she was offered a place at Edinburgh, Newcastle and Nottingham, so why didn't she accept one of them rather than head off to Harvard? Magdalen has also made it clear she would have won a place if she had chosen biochemistry rather than the oversubscribed medicine.

University vice-chancellors have another concern. They fear that the War of Laura Spence's Rejection is the Chancellor's way of preparing people for cuts in university funding. Painting the universities as bastions of privilege will make it easier to intensify the squeeze on higher education, the thinking goes. Treasury officials are apparently talking about an effective 2 per cent cut. At present, universities are being squeezed by 1 per cent a year.

Privately, the Treasury is thought not to be a great fan of Britain's higher education system, believing it to be wasteful and poorly managed. Treasury officials point to empty chairs in university offices on Friday afternoons.

Professor Howard Newby, the CVCP president, is worried that the compact the universities entered into with the Government after Lord Dearing's report is in danger of unravelling. That agreement included the 1 per cent squeeze in return for universities agreeing to widen access and expand student numbers.

"If the Government were to start changing that, we would be very concerned and reserve the right to abandon our commitment to, for example, expand student numbers," says Professor Newby. "Cutting funds would make expansion impossible anyway, without lowering quality."

Government sources confirmed that universities would be getting more money in the comprehensive spending review for access but refused to specify how much or exactly what it would be for. The funds could be for talent spotters to go out and find state school children to apply for the best universities, which would amount to relatively small sums. Or it could be to reward universities recruiting students from postcodes where there are low numbers staying on in higher education.

The timing of the brouhaha is interesting. Elite universities are now considering top-up tuition fees and Downing Street is said to be behind them. But Labour is worried about public opinion. So it needed to prepare the ground. What better than a debate on access sparked off by a state educated girl who failed to get into Oxford? This way it can show its commitment to egalitarianism.

Private schools are worried that the new climate created by Mr Brown's remarks will produce inverted snobbery against them. One mother phoned The Independent to say she was worried her offspring would be discriminated against because they were privately educated. She attended a grammar school in the Seventies but had no faith in comprehensives and had therefore sent her children to private schools. "I worked hard to put my children through the independent system and now, instead of putting them at an advantage, I may have put them at a disadvantage," she says.

Philip Evans, the headmaster of Bedford School and co-chair of the Headmasters Conference/Girls Schools Association university working party, echoed her concern. "Government statements are now pointing towards an increasing and very worrying intervention by central government in the independence of our universities to select their students," he said.

"This is political interference in higher education of the worst kind. It is social engineering."

But some research, notably that carried out by Professor A H Halsey, the eminent sociologist from Nuffield College, supports the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Although Professor Halsey dislikes what he calls the primitive nature of the recent debate, he says: "My articles show perfectly clearly that if you take state and private schools, the state schools are discriminated against, particularly at the level of application but also at the point of competition for admissions."

The reason state school pupils are rejected is that they don't do well at the interview stage, the Professor argues. While there is general recognition that Oxford and Cambridge are reforming (Cambridge has done rather better than Oxford), Professor Halsey argues they haven't done enough. They should abolish the interview, he argues, because that is susceptible to social bias. Professor Ryan favours a university-wide admissions procedure rather than the college-based one. Students' chances are affected by the subject and college they choose rather than the school they come from, he argues. The top one-quarter of applicants could be admitted via a savage scholarship examination and the remainder by a rank order of candidates.

This week the millionaire businessman, Peter Lampl, also implicitly threw his weight behind Gordon Brown when his charity, the Sutton Trust, said that less advantaged pupils were under-represented by up to one-third at the 13 top universities. Mr Lampl is concerned that there are hundreds of pupils who are clever enough for university but not getting there because the system is loaded against them. He briefed the Chancellor before the Laura Spence story broke. Gordon Brown took his message to heart - but could have done his homework better.

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