TOP UNIVERSITIES LESS REPRESENTATIVE

That this House is deeply concerned about the report from the Social Mobility Commission that Britain’s leading universities have become more socially exclusive; deplores the fact that the proportion of students from state schools in these Russell Group universities is lower than it was a decade ago; notes that the number of entrants from the most disadvantaged backgrounds has also fallen and is less than one-in-five; condemns the increasing focus on recruiting wealthy students from outside Europe; believes that the Russell Group universities’ sponsoring of academies is effectively selective; further notes that Liverpool University has sponsored a failing private school to become an academy with a boarding wing and that non-EU students there will be guaranteed a degree course of their choice; and calls on the Government to ensure that Oxford, Cambridge and other top universities become socially representative rather than grotesquely skewed in favour of privately-educated students.