A £600-a-year “finishing school” for bright but disadvantaged children backed by Alan Milburn, the social mobility tsar, and Sir Terry Leahy, the former chief executive of Tesco, has helped 70% of its pupils win places at top universities, a study has found.
The teenagers, who were given mentors, work placements and taught “soft skills” such as networking, were more likely to get into Russell Group universities than the 65% average for independent school pupils with good grades.
Leahy, who was brought up on a Liverpool council estate, said: “ I think there is less social mobility than there was in the past. If you could wave a magic wand you would have schools as good as Eton on a Birmingham estate, but this is a path as close we can get to that.”
An audit of the scheme, which will this year give places to about 1,200 pupils, found it boosted their chances of getting places at top universities by as much as the difference between achieving three A*s at A-level and three As.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies, which conducted the audit, found participants boosted their chance of studying at a university visited by top employers by between 13% and 43%.
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Leahy admitted that the scheme, run by David Johnston, chief executive of the Social Mobility Foundation, and funded by the US bank JP Morgan, the law firm Clifford Chance and others, could help only a small proportion of the population, but hoped it would inspire others.
“Life’s about role models. If people feel that their neighbour or nephew got on, then they will at least go a little further.” He said three boroughs in Liverpool with a population of about 750,000 “didn’t send a single child from state school to Oxbridge in three years”.
Graduates of Russell Group universities dominate certain professions — for senior judges it is 94% — and in a year of the BBC’s Question Time they made up 65% of the guests.
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Leahy said: “The danger
is you will never hear a Scouse accent at the top of any profession.”
Milburn hopes universities will learn from the results to rethink how they spend £735m-a-year funding for widening participation. “Some of that money could be liberated for earlier intervention. Young people need good GCSEs and to feel it worthwhile to stay on for A-levels.”
Natasha Whitham, 18, from Trafford, Greater Manchester, who describes herself as from a long line of teenage mothers, joined the scheme after gaining the equivalent of 13 A*s at GCSE. She now has offers from four top universities.