Purging the

privileged

It hardly seems fair, says Rachel Johnson, but the new higher education watchdog, Steven Schwartz, is about to recommend discrimination against elite schools

This government has tremendous confidence in the gunslingin' American way of doing things, and so we cannot pretend to be unduly surprised when it entrusts our crumblier institutions to Yankees, even if they do have beards. The Tube got Bob Kiley. Now the universities have got a New York giant with Abe Lincoln whiskers called Schwartz, a man with the engaging habit of giving a crinkly smile when asked a question he doesn't intend to answer; and, believe me, there are a bunch of those.

Professor Steven Schwartz has just issued his consultation document on fair access to university. He makes the shock announcement that he will not be able to please everyone, because 'some people believe that admission to university is a reward for working hard and achieving high marks at school' (fancy!) while others believe that universities should be about social mobility and should admit those with lower marks ahead of students with higher grades.

Professor Schwartz keeps insisting that nothing is decided until May next year. He clearly does not want to give too much away, saying that his paper raises more questions than it answers.

Or does it? I have been sleuthing away on behalf of you, our Unashamedly Elitist readers, and I think that the message is pretty clear. Professor Schwartz may not be able to please all, but he will annoy practically everyone, from independent school heads to overburdened admissions tutors, who think that they do a pretty good job already under impossible circumstances. But he will absolutely infuriate the proud parents of children who are jolly super in most respects — head girl at Tudor Hall or rugger captain at Wellington — but not, shall we say, the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Two decades ago, children with these reassuring qualities would have done as Princess Diana (who described herself as 'thick as a plank') did and become a nursery-school teacher, take a secretarial course or attend language school in Florence. Chaps would become tour guides, travel or join the firm. In my husband's generation at Eton, leavers went into the army or the City, and university was the weedy, slightly selfindulgent third option for swots. Now, they all without exception go 'up'. In 1962, the year after Lady Diana Spencer was born, there were just over a quarter of a million students in higher education. In 2001, there were 1.3 million. And Professor Schwartz has rumbled the fact that middleclass children are hogging university places. Here are his statistics: middle-class enrolments have risen by 15 per cent over the past ten years to 50 per cent, whereas enrolments from students from non-professional backgrounds have risen by eight percentage points to just 18 per cent.

This vast expansion of HE has been accompanied, as any don will tell you, by a plummeting of standards. When they get to university, vast numbers of freshers these days don't know much about history. As the song goes: don't know much biology, don't know much about a science book, don't know much about the French they took; and so dons (with much less money, many more students and longer teaching hours) have to spend the first year on what they describe as 'remedial education'.

But Professor Schwartz is not concerned with standards but with access. On that score, the game's up. Prince Harry may have just scraped into Sandhurst, but Professor Schwartz is happily preparing the ground for a pogrom of the privileged children whose successful grades are the product not only of their hard work and ability, but also the school they attended. Meanwhile, the people at the Higher Education Funding Council are preparing, as we speak, a new map for admissions tutors, a geosociological chart showing all the most deprived areas of the country and offering departments a 20 per cent premium on top of the grant for each student they recruit from these postcodes.

Of course, this is social engineering. But it is also an attempt to recruit the most able students from other ranks, and there is simply no way of doing that without accepting that dumb, middle-class kids go to university to the exclusion of state-schooled children of comparable ability. And as quotas are forbidden by law, Professor Schwartz is keen to flag up research which shows that children from state schools get more out of university than their spoon-fed counterparts from fee-paying schools.

The facts are made plain in a 35-page paper from two economists at Warwick University, Smith and Naylor, which is heavily cited by Professor Schwartz. It looks at the entire nationwide undergraduate cohort of 1992-3, and it basically tells us that in the middle-ability range — i.e., non-Oxbridge material — those with state school backgrounds outperform the rest.

Robin Naylor describes this as the 'independent school effect', and it refers to all the stuff you pay huge sums of money to schools to do for your child, i.e., to get them into a nice university with respectable Alevel results, even if, like Di, they have 'a brain the size of a pea'.

Well, apparently, the independent school effect is short-lived, like eating a Guarana Biscuit Boost instead of a proper meal, and soon leads to a 'performance gap' where the kids from state schools power ahead, in a humiliating sorpasso for the Sloanes.

But why are you surprised? Children from elite schools have their networks, their connections, their contacts, their future earning potential, all established before they attend the Freshers' Fair — that's what we pay for. Kids from low-performing LEA schools have to amass all their social capital during the course of their university careers, so they try harder and do better. They get 7 per cent more Firsts and 2.1s than those from private schools who, as Naylor says, suffer from a 'diminished incentive' to study.

Plus, they're statistically likely to be smarter than the well-drilled product of the public-school system. (It stands to reason, unless you believe that intelligence is passed down to children through wealth rather than genes.) If an admissions tutor is faced with a choice of two children, both with identical grades, then, ceteris paribus, 'the former LEA pupil is likely to be drawn from a higher point in the underlying ability distribution', as Professor Schwartz quotes approvingly.

This is the deal, then. Tutors are somehow to divine, without interview, that the pupil with three As from St Cakes is a Tim Nice-But-Dim, while the candidate from Salford comprehensive with two Bs and a C is a Wayne Two Brains, and pick him instead. What 'fair access' means, of course, is getting fewer children from good schools and more children from bad ones into higher education. Soon, I predict, it will be OK yah not to go to university at all.