State school teachers unlikely to advise pupils to apply to Oxbridge

43 per cent of state secondary school teachers say they would rarely or never advise their bright pupils to apply to Oxbridge, according to a new poll published by the Sutton Trust

Just one-fifth (21 per cent) said they always advised their bright pupils to apply and a quarter (28 per cent) said they usually did.

A fifth (19 per cent) of those who wouldn’t encourage their students to apply to Oxford or Cambridge said it was because they thought they were unlikely to be successful in their application, while 13 per cent said that they didn’t think they would be happy there. A majority (60 per cent) reported it was because they didn’t advise students on the right university for them.

The survey of a nationally representative sample of 1,607 primary and secondary school teachers, conducted by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) through the Teacher Voice Omnibus survey also found that common misconceptions about the proportion of state school students at Oxford and Cambridge extend to teachers too.

Over half (55 per cent) of those polled underestimated the percentage of students from state schools on undergraduate courses at Oxbridge. Just over a fifth (22 per cent) thought that fewer than 20 per cent of students at Oxford and Cambridge come from the state sector whereas the actual figure is around 60 per cent – Oxford recently announced a 59 per cent state intake this year. Only one per cent of teachers overestimated the proportion of state school students at the two universities while one in 20 (six per cent) got the right proportion and 38 per cent said they didn’t know.