Esme Pearson dissects the growing complacency surrounding state school access into higher education, following the controversy surrounding Trinity Hall College and the persistent imbalance within Oxbridge admissions.

Cambridge’s Trinity Hall has recently attracted controversy after the approval of a plan to increase engagement with select independent schools, a move aimed at fostering relations and increasing applications to the hall. Schools on the Hall’s list have been reported to include St Paul’s Girls, Eton and Winchester. This was justified by Marcus Tomalin, the college’s Director of Admissions, as being a move to increase the “quality” of the hall’s applicants.

Understandably, this has set off a wave of vocal criticism. The Guardian’s Wilf Vall and Richard Adams wrote an attack on the policy’s attitude to state-educated students, featuring quotes from social mobility expert Lee Elliot Major, who reminds us ‘’The evidence is clear: when talented students who have faced greater barriers gain access to elite universities, they flourish precisely because opportunity, not ability, was the binding constraint’’.

This media attention forced the hall to release a statement in response, in which they boast of programs and figures aimed at both state and diverse enrollment. This includes a 20.4% rise of enrollment of students from disadvantaged backgrounds and a 73% admission rate of students from state education averaged across the last 3 years. Oxford as a whole was reported to have a 66.2% state school admission, and Cambridge slightly trumps this with 71% as of 2024. While this rise is creditable, it’s important that this success doesn’t justify complacency in the development of wider social mobility into elite educational institutions. Ultimately, the reality these statistics demonstrate is that the 6% of the population that is independently educated still disproportionately dominate representation of those in elite education.

What is becoming clear within this conversation is that this partial advancement is being interpreted as sufficient, and a complacency for the fight to increase state educated presence in Oxbridge education is beginning to emerge. The rhetoric pushed by Marcus Tomalin encapsulates this disinterest in social mobility for the state educated. He even goes as far to warn of potential for “reverse discrimination”, advocating that those who are privately educated “arrive at Cambridge with expertise and interests that align well with the intellectual demands” of the university. His reasoning for this is based upon a belief in private school students’ elitism and their ability to “engage critically and independently with their subjects in a way that Cambridge has historically prized”. Notions like this openly discredit state school intelligence, with his assertion that applicants from these elite independent schools would increase the “quality” of admissions into the hall fundamentally diminishing state educated intelligence as second class.

This impression strays from established social scientific findings. Reports like UCL’s recognise that during secondary education, private school students excel largely due to vast advantages in resources. This is said to fundamentally create “better university access”. However, once students reach the same institutions, social scientists have noted that state school students outperform their peers. This trend was recognised in 2014 by the HEFCE, who reported that “state school students tend to do better in their degree studies than students from independent schools with the same prior educational attainment”. The report supported admission reforms like contextual offers and recognised that access is not the same as ability – a reality that Tomalin seems disengaged with. 

In a recent response to this controversy, Cambridge’s Mary Hockaday communicated an understanding to “why language used in the memo has caused upset”. This is not enough to condemn this sentiment. It’s no secret that Oxbridge’s culture is bound up in ideas of the rich white male, and the university’s reputation of elite intelligence has also had a long history of exclusion. Women couldn’t even graduate with a degree at Oxford or Cambridge until 1920 and 1948 respectively, making them the last two universities in the UK to grant women the same qualification as men for their studies. 

These institutions also have a long and uncomfortable history of engagement with the slave trade and colonial enterprise. Reports find direct investment from Cambridge’s colleges into the South Sea Company Shares, the education of sons of slave owners and a strong anti-abolitionist movement alongside the work of Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce. This shouldn’t be a surprise, but it still should be an actively discussed part of institutions like these in British History as they still continue to inform cultural legacies today.

Additionally, social class and regional biases remain ever present in these institutions. London and the South East alone made up 49% of Oxford admissions in 2021. Similar reports can be seen for Cambridge, with 50.7% of admissions coming from the same area as of 2024. These regional differences are often closely tied to class structures as poorer regions face structural disadvantages and fewer resources. 

It is precisely within these historical paradigms of social exclusion that Oxbridge’s elite reputation has been forged. They reflect the social hierarchies entrenched in British social history and the institutions have famously been slow to respond to social changes and diversification in order to protect its elitist image. Intellectual standards remain necessary for the purpose of the institution, but at the same time, there needs to be greater recognition for the long history of social exclusivity and its ramifications today. It is the responsibility for such institutions to engage in their own cultural histories in order to challenge the hegemony of the rhetoric today. 

A perfect meritocracy does not exist within the UK. Access to elite education and jobs has always been monopolised by those within the independent school sector. The Sutton Trust’s Elitist Britain’s 2025 report found that the trajectory from private school into Russell Group or Oxbridge education remains strong, and this culture is carried on into the job market. Not taking a greater stance on the rhetoric that has been exposed during Trinity Hall’s controversy threatens to perpetuate that cycle, right as it is beginning to be broken down.