Don't let Hodge kill our universities

Imagine applying for a job for which you have spent five years training yourself. You achieve everything that the company told you it wanted from you, with flying colours. Just as you are about to start work, you are told that it will no longer be able to employ you because it is taking on someone who never managed to complete the training course but who is poorer than you and "needs a fair chance", as it puts it.

Pretty disgraceful, and downright unfair, you'd no doubt agree. But that is exactly what the Higher Education Minister, Margaret Hodge, wants universities to say to pupils with the best A-level results - we're sorry, but we're going to give your place to someone with worse results than you.

According to Mrs Hodge, the top universities should lower their entry requirements for students from working-class homes. The system is, she says, riddled with class divisions and universities should introduce positive discrimination to widen their social mix - especially elite universities such as Oxford and Cambridge. "I've never witnessed such a class divide as I've seen in the higher education sector," she remarked in a speech.

Before she entered Parliament, Mrs Hodge was the leader of Islington Council where she presided over some of the worst schools in the country, and allowed the council's children's homes to become a haven for child abusers and paedophiles who raped and assaulted childred in their care, until an Evening Standard investigation brought the scandal to light. Even then, she dismissed the accusations.

Islington schools were so bad that there was an influx of private tutors into the borough, as almost every parent who could afford it hired tutors to do the job that the schools weren't doing - teaching their children. The lucky ones left the state sector altogether and were educated at private schools - leaving only those too badlyoff to be able to escape or to pay for a tutor stuck unaided in Islington's sink schools.

Although Mrs Hodge does not have the direct power to change university admission procedures, it seems she doesn't have to. The Higher Education Funding Council is considering doing it for her, by cutting its funding to universities which do not have what they judge to be the right social mix.

The HEFC has said that it wants to set "targets" for the admission of working-class and state-educated pupils. Those which don't hit these targets may be penalised with severe fines.

Do these people never give up? Do they never learn? The way to improve standards is not through social engineering but by - guess what? - increasing standards. It was precisely this sort of misguided attempt at social engineering which saddled us with what Alastair Campbell infamously called the " bogstandard comprehensive" - the very cause of the problem in the first place. It's not the universities which are to blame for being middle-class enclaves, but the deplorable standard of too many secondary schools. Nothing would be more counterproductive or would more devalue the very notion of university education than lowering the admission standards for the poor.

Some 600,000 children pass through the education system every year, of whom approximately half are from the poorest social classes. Of those, only 3,500 - just over one per cent - get into one of the top 13 elite universities (known as the Russell Group). Indeed, across the university sector as a whole, only 15 per cent are from those poorest classes.

So the make-up of our universities is certainly not representative of society as a whole. But whose fault is that? As it happens, there is evidence that there is some discrimination against stateschool pupils, albeit no doubt unintentional. Despite state schools providing more than two-thirds of all pupils with three A grades at A-level, only half get in to the Russell Group universities.

It works in reverse, too. Only seven per cent of children attend independent schools, but they make up 39 per cent of entrants to the Russell Group universities. Statistically, the probability of getting into a top university is approximately 25 times greater if you come from an independent school than from a lower social class or a poor area, and is approximately double what it should be if A-level results were the sole criterion for admission.

That is simply wrong, and needs to change. But we should be very careful about confusing two completely different ideas. It is one thing - and perfectly proper - to criticise universities which do not give stateschool pupils with the same A-level results as those from independent schools a fair crack of the whip.

It is quite another to start saying that, in order to engineer a different social mix, universities should ignore A-level results. And that is what Mrs Hodge and the Higher Education Funding Council are threatening. She has praised a scheme at Bristol University's history department, where tutors make allowances for applicants from schools with poor results and accept students with "far lower A-level qualifications ... Of course, A-levels are important, but they are not necessarily the only way to measure potential." Is she really suggesting that state-school pupils with Bs and Cs at A-level who want to be doctors should be allowed into the university of their choice in spite of their grades?

Labour certainly deserves praise for its efforts to reform state schools and increase standards. It is, after all, the poor who suffer most from a lax attitude to education, as we have spent the past few decades discovering.

Our schools are only just recovering from the condescending attitude that we ought to expect worse standards from the poor. New Labour is supposed no longer to believe in that sort of nonsense. Having suffered the consequences in secondary schools, the last thing we should be doing is introducing it into the universities.