Stewart Graham has, I fear, misunderstood the nature of the problem regarding access to university for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds (Letters, January 9). Like him, my father was a janitor and, I can add, my mother was a school cleaner. I, too, lived in Drumchapel in the 1950s and 1960s, and got to university. The difference between us is that I don't extrapolate from my experience and assume that young people who live where I lived have the same opportunities. Frankly, the situations some families find themselves in in the early part of the 21st century in Scotland beggar belief and the casualties are the children who become part of the statistics of "transgenerational unemployment". My working-class family of the 1950s supported my educational ambitions in a way which some of today's young people can only dream of.
No-one is suggesting that to be poor is to be incapable of reaching university by the conventional route. Young people, albeit in smaller numbers than should be the case, do so every year. But the simple fact, borne out by decades of research, is that if you are a young person from certain parts of Scotland you are six times less likely to end up in university than your more affluent counterparts. However you look at it, poverty is still the single-biggest indicator of educational underachievement in Britain.
What can be done? First, we must continue to widen access to university. One way is to have more than one kind of qualification as an entry point. Highers may well be the gold standard, but they examine only a narrow range of skills and aptitudes, and are not good predictors of success at degree level. Secondly, we need to trust our teachers more to assess the achievements of their pupils without the heavy hand of exam league tables distorting the learning process. Thirdly, we need a consensus about what it is to be an educated young person in the 21st century. Surely it must include the so-called soft skills of working in teams, problem-solving, critical thinking, creativity and communication. Simply filling heads with knowledge, most of which is accessible via the internet, won't do. Young people need to be able to evaluate sources, synthesise information and reach considered judgments.
Universities need to wake up to the fact that being part of a small elite is no route to survival. The ancient universities cannot opt out of the wider-access agenda and still make a claim for public funding. Those of us who have degrees should play no part in trying to maintain the exclusivity of universities. Like Stewart Graham, I want the sons and daughters of janitors and cleaners to get to any university they want to . . . through the front door.
Brian Boyd, Professor of Education, University of Strathclyde.
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