2011 Hertford College Magazine (Issue 91)

ackgrounds will, in addition, be supported
by a system of bursaries and fee-waivers.
It has been calculated that, on this basis,
students from households in the lowest
income category – those eligible for free
school meals – will actually be better off than
they are under the existing regime. But there
can be no denying that the perception is very
different, and there is a real risk that potential
applicants from such backgrounds will
be put off by what they see as the unsustainable
financial burden involved in studying at
a university such as Oxford. The coalition
government is evidently conscious of this
risk and is putting in place a set of demanding
criteria for ‘access and outreach’ which
universities will have to meet if they are to
charge fees much above the lower threshold
of £6,000. We should not shy away from this
challenge. Hertford was engaged in access
and outreach before the terms were coined,
but realising these ideals in the new circumstances
will be far from straightforward.
Having abolished Oxford’s entrance examination
in the 1990s we rely on ‘A’ level
grades, supplemented – as growing numbers
gain three ‘A’s - by subject-specific
tests, and from 2011 by the new super-grade
A*s. This was done to ensure fairness, but
A level success is itself unevenly distributed
socially and by school type, and candidates
from relatively deprived backgrounds
may well fail to display their innate ability.
If we are to realise our access goals without
compromising quality we shall need imaginative
and innovative ways of reaching
gifted students. We shall need to expand our
very successful summer school programme,
but other forms of pre-A level intervention
will also be needed. One possibility is a
pre-degree ‘foundation year’ for high-quality
students whose A level grades might not
otherwise allow them to come to Oxford.
HERTFORD COLLEGE MAGAZINE
Principal’s letter
Undergraduates liable for a £9,000 p.a.
fee are also, of course, likely to be correspondingly
demanding consumers – particularly
if they have elder siblings who paid
much less and parents who got their university
education free of charge – and we
will, it seems, be required by government
to make an explicit series of undertakings
as to what we will offer our students in the
form of a ‘student charter’. This further emphasis
on the quality of teaching and, more
broadly, on what has come to be called the
‘student experience’ is something which we
should welcome rather than see as a cause
for alarm. Oxford’s colleges have provided
an unparalleled quality of student experience
for generations whilst the tutorial system
provides an undergraduate education of unmatched
quality. The challenging question,
of course, is how we can continue to fund
all this with a fee-level running to little more
than half of our costs per undergraduate.
“ This emphasis on the ‘student
experience’ is something we
should welcome ”
Oxford is responding to this challenge
with a ‘Teaching Fund’ scheme, based on a
partnership between colleges and the University’s
four Academic Divisions, and
funded by the release of £60M of capital
from Oxford University Press. The aim
of the scheme is to provide endowments to
support sixty ‘CUF’ posts in the Humanities
– combined university lecturerships and
college tutorial fellowships – as well as a
smaller number of posts in other Divisions.
The total required to endow a single CUF
is £2m of which £1.2m must be raised by
the College in order to release the balance
from the Teaching Fund. Once endowed the
11.