Under Review: OppOx Digital

“The university would like to offer you the chance to…”

Receiving an offer letter from Oxford has the habit of imprinting a permanent smile onto one’s face. Any hope or, better yet, delusion that you may be bright and capable enough for ‘that place’ is suddenly vindicated. The proceeding elation feels infinite. Mocks? A-Levels? No trouble – you’re smart enough for Oxford.

This elation, in my case, happened to be unfortunately short-lived. A few weeks later, a second email arrived, this time not from St. John’s but from a programme called Opportunity Oxford. The email was gentle in its approach: while I had been recognised for my “excellent academic potential”, didn’t I think I would benefit from some extra help? OppOx’s supposed offering is targeted academic help for those “whose prior education may not have offered very many opportunities for such support”. With only around 17% of offer holders being invited to complete the digital programme each year, I had now become part of a minority that wasn’t packaged with the same glory that my admission letter had carried. 

This felt incongruous with my time at school – my London state school had been my academic base for seven years, an experience defined by great teaching, an academically supportive environment, and lifelong friendships. A confused exhale was quickly followed by a sunken pit in my stomach – the pride I had only recently been granted was being snatched away at a moment’s notice. Why was it that my status as a state school student made my academic background a cause for concern? Regardless, I accepted the invitation, hopeful that the promise of “numerous benefits” would be plentiful, and that upon completion I would feel more confident about starting a new chapter at university. 

The first of ten tasks I had to complete told me that this would be quite a different story. Faced with twenty or so pages of reading, I was prompted to read the argument the author had made, then summarise it in 300 or so words. As I trawled through the pages, I considered whether the privately educated students, soon to be my peers, would take to this task any more naturally than I was. National exams like A-Levels follow, after all, a standard curriculum for which the privately and state-educated aren’t expected to acquire different academic skill sets to pass. Summarising information, though, must be a task that state school students struggle with in the eyes of this university. 

I wondered what the students that hadn’t been asked to complete these menial tasks over the summer were up to. Probably the usual: beach clubs, exotic holidays, cocktails at a trendy West London bar. This isn’t to say my own life hasn’t been afforded some of these luxuries, but my fears were confirmed by a quick tap through Instagram stories. It was true! I was, in fact, the naughty schoolchild being forced to sit inside during breaktime to complete their unfinished homework while the harder-working (richer!) students could go play on the monkey bars. 

If it is at all possible to get better at robotically summarising information – as the majority of tasks demanded of me – I wasn’t provided the feedback that would allow me to do so. Marking was slow, and massively varied in terms of the length and personalisation of feedback. I was left with the impression that the tutors had been told that ‘Good work here’ would generally suffice. Not too promising, then, for a programme that had loftily sworn to help me “realise [my] potential”. 

It is safe to say that there is more than enough self-doubt when applying to Oxford from a state school background without the university adding another layer of academic interrogation. When there haven’t been a host of people you can ‘follow in the footsteps of’ – maybe you’re a first-generation immigrant, your parents haven’t been to university, or your school doesn’t have a rich history of sending students to Oxbridge – the fear that you aren’t good enough comes as naturally as breathing. To be indirectly told, through programmes like Opportunity Oxford, that this is true, that your baseline academic background and natural aptitude mean you are less capable than your privately educated contemporaries, feeds into a dangerous stereotype.

The assumption behind Opportunity Oxford is clear. State schools are inevitably worse, providing only a limited, whittled-down version of education. The differences I have noticed between my state and privately educated classmates, though, aren’t those of academic merit but fundamental differences in confidence and feeling of belonging. This isn’t to say that smaller class sizes and more teaching hours don’t cause any disparity between state and privately educated students upon entering university. After all, Oxford’s tutorial system rests on the assumption that this style of teaching is highly advantageous. If OppOx Digital is an attempt to rectify this gap, though, its focus on summarising and regurgitating information causes it to fall far short. Therefore, subjecting state school students to extra work and an insistence on inferiority before we even arrive is nothing more than an embarrassment. OppOx Digital is not fit for purpose. It can hide under the guise of accessibility no longer.

 

Words by Sophia Shade.

Art by Naia Searight.