The rocky road to Oxbridge

NOT one pupil at my daughter’s school got into Oxbridge this year,’ laments a friend on the Isle of Man, ‘and they are an exceptional year.’ Last year, tabloid headlines made much of an apparent collapse in the Oxbridge places secured by Eton, but schools everywhere are finding it’s tough at the top. Applicants are 20% more likely to get rejected from Russell Group-level universities now than they were in 2012, says analysts DataHE. This is affecting everyone, although figures suggest that these universities ‘are trying to prioritise dwindling growth capacity for under-represented groups’.

Many of us know supremely clever, rounded, privately educated children who have been bruised by rejection from their