Last month a conference was held at the London School of Economics to mark the 50th anniversary of the Robbins report. The report was commissioned by the British Conservative government in 1961 and published two years later.

It included recommendations that would increase the number of students involved in higher education, and argued that “increased attention should be given to the problems of introducing young men and women from families with scanty educational background to the atmosphere of higher education”.

As a result of reforms and expansion implemented following the report’s publication, the number of full-time university students rose from 197,000 in 1967 to 217,000 in 1973.

However Anna Vignoles, Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, argued that, though the number of poorer students in higher education has increased over the past 50 years, it has not had the levelling effect on British society that had been expected by the Robbins report.

Vignoles also pointed out that, though the number of university students with backgrounds in manual occupations has been increasing steadily for decades, the number of students from families with a long-established tradition of attending university is also on the rise, and as a result poorer students continue to be under-represented. Family background, argued Vignoles, is still the key determinant of educational achievement.

She cited a 2013 paper published by the Royal Statistical Society on the participation of state school students in Higher Education. More than half of students in the least deprived group enter university upon finishing A-levels, but less than a fifth of students from the most deprived backgrounds participate in higher education.

One area in which there has been an improvement has been the participation of women in higher education. At the time the report was published, only five per cent of Britons went to university, and less than a quarter were women.

Nowadays, over half of students in higher education are female and nearly 50 per cent of all students stay in some kind of education after the age of 18.

The Robbins report saw higher education as a means of achieving social mobility, but Vignoles argued that this has proven to be false. She also noted that the gap in achievement emerges much earlier – tackling the widening gap in higher education participation would require investment in education at a younger age.

The Robbins report also made a specific call for a “greater equality of opportunity to enter Oxford and Cambridge.” The Royal Statistical Society has studied the participation of state school students in “high status” universities. Just under a quarter of students from the least deprived quintile attend Oxbridge compared to around three per cent from the most deprived backgrounds.

Last May, the University of Cambridge announced that the number of private school students claiming places at the University was at a 30-year low, with around a third of students being independently educated.

The University related this to reforms made in an attempt to recruit more pupils from under-represented groups.