Mark O’Brien: Road to Oxbridge is one less travelled by Northerners

IT takes the better part of four hours to travel by train from Leeds to Oxford, changing over in Birmingham along the way. You’d think it was a journey few people ever make.

I could give a tour guide’s commentary of the route, having made that round trip countless times over the last three years. Back in 2008, I left Leeds Grammar School to take my place at Oxford University reading English Literature. But I belonged to a distinct minority when I first made that journey.

As graduates like me tossed our mortarboards, uncorked the champagne and for one night put aside our worries about job prospects and real life, educationalists and social commentators were coming down with another bout of earnest navel-gazing over the news that youngsters from London and the South East are several times more likely to win a place at Britain’s top universities than students in the North.

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Hardly shocking revelations. Last year, the capital and the Home Counties sent 2,700 students to Oxbridge – over three times more than the North East, North West, and Yorkshire and the Humber, whose students altogether took only 800 places. Indeed, Oxford last year took more students from China than from the north-east of England.

Students across our region are less likely to get a place at a top university, and, perhaps more importantly, are less likely to even apply.

There are elementary reasons for this North-South divide. Students down south achieve considerably higher marks at GCSE and A-Level. Furthermore, they often tend to look for a university closer to home.

Oxford University spends £8m on a raft of support schemes, on outreach projects and summer schools. Still, some insist that it can do more to transform the culture of the institution. Even those that make the journey arrive to find their residential “staircases”, their college bars and dining halls dominated by a clique from the same tiny corner of the world.

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A handful of students lately began to fight back. Lancashire-born Natalie Theodoulou is a founder of “Northern Soc”, a light-hearted student society whose calendar of events recently included dinner at Oxford’s premier bangers-and-mash joint (much gravy was supped, I’m told). From her experience, she admits “the negative stereotypes of Oxford students” may be more dominant up North.

But it isn’t good enough to lay the blame at anyone else’s door. Back in the North, we have to raise our ambitions too. We cannot separate inequality in higher education from the many other devastating inequalities between North and South. Sadly, the gulf may yet become wider and more entrenched.

Most of this year’s graduates who left my college – St Catherine’s – were either heading abroad to take time out and travel, finding work nearby in Oxford or taking up promising jobs in London.

I can’t preach: I’m joining them. When British cities outside London regain their civic pride and self-confidence, then they may become able to compete with the capital and attract talented people from across the professions, in turn promoting investment in the North, improving people’s living standards and ultimately broadening the horizons of their children – raising their threshold of possibility.

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I remember one of my teachers at LGS telling me that applying to Oxbridge was something at which you “have a go” and see what happens. LGS (now the Grammar School at Leeds) has several teaching staff who themselves were educated at Oxbridge, giving students an immediate psychological advantage. He and others fostered an ambition and a sense of purpose, a belief that no matter where I was from I could compete with the best. As a region, we need that mentality.

And then hopefully, one day, that train ride from Leeds to Oxford will be a heck of a lot shorter too.

Mark O’Brien, from Leeds, graduated earlier this year from Oxford University.