Sir: John Casey, Fellow of Gonville and Caius, (`Attacking scholarship,'
19 November) argues as follows. Oxford is changing its admission procedure, schools able to offer seven terms preparation for scholarship examination will suffer, academic standards will fall, Neil Kinnock is opposed to academic excellence anyway, the comprehensive state schools will now be able to match the resulting low standards, therefore bring back the grammar schools. Let me argue as follows. John Casey is a Fellow of Gonville and Caius, he supports the status quo which is unjust to the state schools, his college by association favours a tiny segment of independent schools, the best degrees are obtained by state school pupils, he favours lower standards, therefore his college does not favour
scholarship. This kind of argument, his and mine, is comic.
We can all enjoy a field day with closed minds and a concluding non sequitur. But the issue is simple. Statistics demonstrate beyond any scintilla of doubt that approx- imately half the places in Oxbridge are shared out among six per cent of the age group. Statistics demonstrate beyond all doubt that the best degrees are being award- ed to students drawn from the remaining 94 per cent of the population. There is an ex- traordinary reservoir of intellectual ability existing in the thousands of state school students who never even apply to Oxbridge. Neil Kinnock, quite splendidly, is opposed to the injustice in this as in other systems. The seven term preparation system favours the independent sector and enables the en- trants from these schools to obscure basic inability to reach the heights of the best degrees. Level chances after four terms would make comparisons easier. Of course, everyone knows that the independent sector will start its cramming even sooner, but fac- tors with immaturity will assist the admis- sions tutors to make more rational choices than at present. The closed scholarship system will also terminate and this perhaps troubles the impossible conservatives in the Oxbridge colleges. They exist in shoals and they inflict annual injustice on the state schools. Political thinkers will be taking cognisance of this long-standing grievance.
But the most ridiculous claim in John Casey's article must surely be that scholar- ship is in such short supply in the state com- prehensive schools that we must bring back the grammar schools. How profoundly silly!
John Herbert
Headmaster, Lliswerry High School, Nash Road, Newport, Gwent
Previous page
