Helena Pike

Once again, this week has seen the return of the immortal Oxbridge debate around the country. This time, it’s comments made by an exasperated sixth form maths teacher who, when cornered at the end of the day by a particularly ‘driven’ child, lamenting the ‘silly mistakes’ in his mock paper that meant he just scrape an A, asked him who cares about grades anyway? Is it better “to go to Cambridge with three As and hate it or to Bangor with three Cs and love it?”

The twitter world was, without fail, alive and affronted within minutes. One policy advisor to the education secretary, Michael Gove, even suggested implementing some sort of rescue mission. Of course, the whole scenario has been grossly over exaggerated. Firstly, Bangor University doesn’t actually offer a degree in pure mathematics. Obviously, the teacher in question was simply trying to give his student some perspective. Slow down, relax, enjoy your youth and so forth. The student, after all, trotted off at the end of the year to Warwick University maths department, the three promised As in hand, and for all extensive purposes, unharmed by his encounter.

However, the teacher’s account does raise an interesting point – one that should not be ignored. Are some prospective Oxbridge candidates being discouraged from application? The national media is always saturated with articles on every aspect of the application process. However, especially after the publication of a report by the Sutton Trust, the disparity between applications has come to light.

One example cited by the report uses findings from two neighbouring schools in Cornwall, one independent and one state, each with almost identical achievements in grades. Where as the independent school saw almost 70% of their pupils applying to either university, less than a third from the state school did so. I am by no means negating the issue of the bias, intended or no, of the admissions system but perhaps the more pressing issue is not poverty of achievement but poverty of aspiration. This is, after all, what the various ‘Access’ committees around our university are aiming to rectify.

With regards to the situation described in the article, I am unable to decide where my sympathies lie. In explanation of his actions, the teacher describes how he came here to do maths, a subject that he ‘ate, drank and slept’, but over the ensuing years, he saw his love ‘nearly die’. As an historian who naively took on further mathematics a-level, I do appreciate how intense and ill thought through study can kill an interest, but how far do our negative experiences allow us to influence others?

While reminders of reality are all very well and good, this encounter could most certainly have backfired; a less confident and perceptive student, a teacher whose firm tone comes across as more annoyed than he thought. This student could have ended up as just another statistics of those capable, intelligent youths, frightened off from application.

Obviously this scenario isn’t quite reconcilable with the grand debates about the state of the English education system but, somehow, this doesn’t sit right. I always thought the pupils who strove hardest and pushed themselves furthest were the ones who made teaching worthwhile, not a chore, but maybe I’m just an idealist.

Johnathan Booth

“But what is better: to go to Cambridge with three As and hate it or go to Bangor with three Cs and love it?” The question posed by Jonny Griffiths, a maths teacher in Norfolk, to the ‘obsessed’ student who did not quite manage to get the high A he wanted in his desperate bid to work towards Cambridge, deserves more than an elitist scoff and dismissal. In many respects he is completely right.

Obviously there is a degree of rhetoric on Griffiths’ part; he is clearly trying to get his student to see that killing yourself over one module at the age of 17 is not necessarily worth the pain. But how many people, including myself, were that same kid, the one that when it came to revision time threw everything aside in the panic, that thought one less minute revising may mean the difference between a B and A, the difference between Cambridge and some other ‘inferior’ university? The reality I’d paint now to my 17 year old self is similar to what this maths teacher is telling his student.

Whilst I cannot comment on what Bangor is really like, what I can do is talk about Cambridge. Do I hate it here? No, but like many others I don’t love the place to pieces either. It is easy to mock the workload of friends at other universities, but even those at Russell Group unis get free time. They get an ability to live. Sure, there are people here who manage to fit in their rowing, their rugby, future political careers, their sleep, their social life and their first class degree, but these are the minority – are the rest of us really getting the most of our degree? Just as Griffiths is telling his student to enjoy being a teenager, how often do we allow ourselves to enjoy this time of our lives, being at university? If we allow much time, we fail to take advantage of being at the ‘best university in the world’. If we don’t, we miss out on making the most of being young. All this is before we factor in just how pretentious the conversations you overhear around the town can be, the lack of ‘normality’ here, or how little there is to do within the locale of Cambridge compared to other student cities around the country.

The reality is that Cambridge is not the heaven painted by the press nor the prospectuses, and it is not the instant access to the upper echelons of government or high culture (those are decided, still, by your family, class and background before you even have to worry about the words ‘personal statement’). It is a wonderful place to learn and to be tested to ones maximum – but it is not the only way to get employed. Don’t let the bubble fool you, Cambridge is not the centre of the universe, and it is not the only way to get an education.