Monthly Archives: July 2024

Dr. Damian Windle, Head of The XL Academy at Ashton Sixth Form College

A recent media announcement (March 2024) has been doing the rounds regarding how the universities of Oxford and Cambridge need to improve in terms of attracting more state school students and helping them succeed at such elite institutions[1]. Indeed, such calls are a perennial feature of the widening participation agenda and the broader socio-political landscape with the increasingly heated debate during the 2022 ill-fated Tory leadership contest a demonstration of how access to Oxbridge has become weaponised[2].

A Sutton Trust report a few years ago underlined the imbalance in state vs independent school acceptances to Oxbridge, with independent schools 7 times more likely to gain a place than state schools (Montacute and Cullinane 2018) and 8 top independent schools having more offers than 3000 state schools put together. Clearly there is a discrepancy in who is able to attain the ‘valuable prize’ (Mountford-Zimdars 2016) of an offer to study at such elite institutions – why is this? I was curious as to how high achieving sixth form students themselves perceived the Oxbridge application process from their perspective and in their own words and embarked on a research journey that would shine a light on this social practice.

My research has focussed on the student experience of high achieving sixth form students with particular reference to how they perceived and experienced the Oxbridge application process. Based on focus groups and interviews over the course of a year at a Northern Sixth Form College, I found the application process viewed from the students’ perspective to be an obscuration, with each stage of the Oxbridge application process lacking transparency and students not knowing or understanding the ‘rules of the game’ (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990) to succeed. For many of the students, they felt disadvantaged in not knowing what Oxbridge was looking for in the writing of their personal statements for their initial application for university. Similarly, they felt unprepared for Oxbridge entrance exams (which had minimal support in terms of mark schemes and specifications on what would be covered) and the subsequent interviews had an air of mystery and lack of clarity as to what to expect with valuable success criteria withheld from them. Some students even felt in the dark over why they had in the end been rejected from Oxbridge with bland generic feedback offered from the Oxbridge colleges, leaving the students feeling that they were at fault – hardly a great mindset for them to approach their A-level exams 2 months later. It is little surprise that the language couched in terms of applying to Oxbridge by the students was one of luck: ‘a gamble’ or ‘a wildcard’ – in essence an arbitrary game of chance in which the odds were stacked against them.

Part of the reason why these students felt like they had little chance, my research suggests, is because of their lack of social, cultural and economic capital (Bourdieu 1984) that prevented them from fully understanding how to play the Oxbridge application game. They did not have the family support, the social connections or the financial support for extra tutoring. Moreover, they had misrecognised the application process to be one of ‘if you are good enough then you will get in’ when in fact it was far more complex and skewed in favour of applicants who had more capital and hence a greater understanding of the application process. This was further compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic which highlighted how the lack of open events and in-person interviews hindered these 6^th form students as they found it difficult to imagine their future (Stubbs and Murphy 2020) and ‘up their game’ during online interviews.

An interesting feature of my research was how the lack of success criteria at each stage of the Oxbridge application process created and perpetuated certain myths. These were stories passed from student to student surrounding the difficulty of an Oxbridge application and were perhaps a way in which the students made sense of their experiences in the absence of a transparent process. This ranged from astonishingly difficult interviews to students being rejected even though they had perfect grades. Crucially, these myths were rarely positive and only added to the sense of low confidence and being hesitant underdogs in the application process.

So where does this get us? My research suggests that if we consider the Oxbridge application process as a game, then currently the rules of this game are not transparent and not clear enough to create equity amongst all that apply. Crucially, the high achieving students that are disadvantaged the most in this process tend to be the ones who have less capital than others – students who might come from low income backgrounds or be the first in their family to apply to university. In order to level the playing field, my research proposes a series of recommendations such as exemplar Oxbridge personal statements and interview questions for every subjects so that maybe, just maybe, all students get an equal chance at playing the Oxbridge game.

Read the research in full: http://shura.shu.ac.uk/33552/

References

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction a social critique of the judgement of taste. London: Routledge.

Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture (2nd ed.) Sage.

Montacute, R. and Cullinane, C. (2018). Access to Advantage: The influence of schools and place on admissions to top universities. London: The Sutton Trust

Mountord-Zimdars, A. (2016). Meritocracy and the university selective admission in England and the United States. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

 Stubbs, J. E., & Murphy, E. C. (2020). ‘You got into oxbridge?’ under-represented students’ experiences of an elite university in the south of England. Higher Education Quarterly, 74(4), 516-530. doi:10.1111/hequ.12251

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2024/mar/10/oxbridge-must-help-pupils-from-state-schools-succeed-college-head-says

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/aug/01/liz-truss-tory-race-oxbridge

Dr. Robbie Campbell, XP School, XP Trust, Doncaster

Introduction

Humans are hard-wired to remember stories. The use of stories or narratives in science to engage pupils is nothing new. I remember being told the stories of Fitz Haber, Edward Jenner and Marie Curie during my secondary school science lessons. The purpose of such stories was to bring the content alive and to help us, as students, to engage with what we were learning They shined a light on the people who developed the theories and concepts we studied. Often though, these narratives, while bringing interest, were tangential to the process of building knowledge and understanding concepts. In this piece, I suggest that narratives can enable teachers to go beyond engagement with students and can help students to build conceptual understanding by creating a connection which runs across a number of lessons and provides a sequence for learning. Thus, curriculum narratives can be considered a curriculum design feature, and can enable teachers to consider how individual pieces of knowledge connect and relate to the subject as a whole.

Curriculum narratives

There is evidence to suggest that narratives support students’ understanding and development of schema (Schank & Abelson, 1995; Willingham, 2009). Research into curriculum narratives is a growing area (Makar et al., 2018) and discussion of curriculum narratives is becoming increasingly popular in practitioner magazines (Beauchamp, 2022) and on popular education blogs (Counsell, 2018; Raichura, 2020). As part of my doctoral study, I researched how teachers design the curriculum, paying particular attention to sequencing of science concepts (Campbell, 2024). This article considers how the use of curriculum narratives as a design feature can affect the sequence of learning using an illustrative example of a science unit on ‘chemistry of the atmosphere’ which was given by a teacher in the study. The curriculum narrative change described below flips the traditional sequence of more abstract unfamiliar content at the start of the unit and more familiar content at the end. In doing so, the teacher starts the curriculum with the most concrete knowledge and leads students towards the more abstract knowledge.

Traditionally, science units are sequenced such that more abstract content is placed at the start of the unit, building students’ understanding to enable them to comprehend familiar concepts. For example, a teacher might start by teaching students about cells and organelles, before moving on to discuss organs and organ systems. A teacher in my doctoral study gave the example of the key stage 3 ‘chemistry of the atmosphere’ unit to illustrate how use of narratives can affect sequencing of knowledge. The sequence below represents a traditional narrative, and is reflective of how many science teachers would approach the unit:

• the evolution of the atmosphere from the earth’s inception until the modern day
• climate change, causes, issues and solutions
• pollution of the atmosphere, its effects and some ways humans mitigate this pollution.

The teacher described how, by sequencing content in this way, science is taught in a way which makes sense to an expert scientist: ‘This topic has been traditionally taught in this order [shown above], as it logically follows from the perspective of a science specialist to start from the beginning of time…then moves on to human activities which are more recent’. This traditional sequence starts from the more abstract concepts and ends with the most concrete and relatable concepts to students.

This sequence can be mapped using semantics (Figure 1), a tool from Legitimation Code Theory developed by Karl Maton (2014). SG- – represents abstract concepts which connect weakly to context, while SG++ represents more concrete concepts which connect strongly to context.

Instead of adopting the traditional narrative described above, the teacher suggested: ‘Why not start from a place of familiarity? Beginning with what the modern atmosphere is composed…and then human effects on the climate and then going back in time to how we have achieved the current modern day atmospheric composition…’.

By flipping the traditional sequencing of the unit, the more concrete and relatable ideas are placed at the start of the unit, followed by more complex and abstract ideas. This allowed students to build abstract knowledge from a place where they had more background knowledge to work with. This is shown in Figure 2 where the sequence of learning begins with a stronger connection to context (SG++) and ends with the most abstract concepts  (SG- -).

Figure 2. Semantic wave of a ‘flipped’ science unit

Conclusion

Curriculum narratives are powerful curriculum design features which can not only engage students but flip the sequencing of ideas so that students can integrate them more effectively into their schema. For the potential of curriculum narratives to be realised, teachers need to consider how abstract concepts develop in their subject. Well-considered narratives have the potential not only to support students’ learning, but also to support teachers’ professional development by engaging them in the important work of curriculum thinking. For more on using narratives in science, the Institute of Physics (IOP) offers storylines which support teachers to reconsider the more traditional approaches to sequencing science units (IOP, 2023).

References

Beauchamp, A. (2022). Living and learning inside the story: How storytelling can shape curriculum design. Impact.

Campbell, R. (2024). How teachers design the active science curriculum. (Unpublished doctoral disseration). Sheffield Hallam University.

Counsell, C. (2018). Taking curriculum seriously. Impact.

Makar, K., Ali, M., & Fry, K. (2018). Narrative and inquiry as a basis for a design framework to reconnect mathematics curriculum with students. International Journal of Educational Research, 92, 188–198.

Maton, K. (2014). Knowledge and Knowers: Towards a realist sociology of education (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203885734

Institute of Physics [IOP]. (2023). https://spark.iop.org/

Raichura, P. (2020, August 4). Curricular narrative. Bunsen Blue. https://bunsenblue.wordpress.com/2020/08/04/curricular-narrative/

Schank, R., & Abelson, R. (1995). Knowledge and memory: The real story. In R. Wyer (Ed.). Knowledge and memory: The real story. Advances in social cognition (Vol. 8, pp. 1–86). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Willingham, D. (2009). Why don’t students like school? A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom. Jossey-Bass/Wiley.