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The govt is considering introducing 'minimum entry requirements' for students, meaning they must pass a minimum A-level threshold to get into Higher Education. This is a terrible idea, which would have stopped me from going to university. For various reasons, due mostly to being
17 and daft and from a non-university background, I ballsed up all my exams at school and cared not one jot. I worked in various jobs - shops, call centres, labouring - until I was 23, when I decided to try and go to uni. I was working & decided to do distance learning A Levels.
I took English & (why?) Maths and applied to 6 unis. I got knocked back by 5 on the basis of my existing grades. Only UCL, the most competitive of the lot, invited me to interview. I finished a shift in the Tesco call-centre and got the overnight bus to London for interview.
My uni experience mostly consisted of sneaking into the indie night at Dundee student union (£1 a pint before 9!). My interviewers were among the first academics I'd knowingly met. One was a medievalist, the other a Shakespearean. I knew nothing about either topic.
But we spoke about what I HAD read, and what I hadn't, and why, and what I thought. I practically begged for a place. I then did my first ever practical crit, in which I boldly identified the anonymous text as being probably a WW1 poem. Afterwards, I ran into Dillons, grabbed a
Norton anthology, looked up the first line and discovered it had been written in 1557. That, I assumed, was that. I got the overnight bus back home and went straight into the call centre the next morning. But then an offer letter came which said, ridiculously, brilliantly, that
I only needed a D in my A Level English. I called them. "Thanks, but you haven't said what I need to get in Maths. UCL's minimum tariff is meant to be AAA?" "Drop maths", they said. "We couldn't care less whether you're good at sums." In fact, my A levels don't meet the entry
tariff of any university in which I've either studied or taught, & I have degrees from Famous Places. I got comically bad marks at school, but I was smart and my university interviewers spotted it. And, crucially, they had the flexibility to ignore their advertised and offer me a
place on those ridiculously easy terms because they knew that A Levels tell only a partial story about any individual's potential. People do, and don't, achieve good A Levels for any number of reasons. This doesn't mean they can't excel at University, or
that universities who offer them the chance to do so aren't doing valuable work, transforming the lives of individuals and the communities in which they live. This value isn't always easily quantified, but it exists nonetheless, although it's clearly beyond the ken of this govt.
So this news makes me despair, and I hope it never comes to pass. I'm proud that my current employer, Birkbeck, has a mission to educate people who, like me at 23, want to return to study but can't quite see how. This is a fairly self-indulgent thread; it's a story I still marvel
at, so I tell it often. But now a government that preaches 'levelling up' now wants to block one route by which those who aren't perfectly-formed (or extensively tutored) at 17 can gain entry to university, by removing the sort of discretion that benefitted me. Shame on them.
