Chris Patten’s plea for Oxford

Lord (Chris) Patten, the former Tory minister, has condemned the government's insistence on trying to propel more children from the state schools into Oxford University, of which he is the chancellor, claiming that it should not be used as "a social security office" to widen participation in the upper echelons of higher education.

Speaking at the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference annual meeting, he said that Oxford had "no chance" of increasing state school admissions to meet targets so long as the gap in exam performance existed, an assertion supported by research from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. "The sense that many universities have is that they are being asked to make up for the deficiencies of secondary education. If this were the aim, it would be a fool's mission." Latest figures show that 53 per cent of Oxford's student intake is from state schools. The target is to raise this to 62 per cent by the end of the decade.

Patten's comments were coupled with a plea to charge middle-class parents more for a child's university tuition by lifting the current fees cap of £3,140 per annum. He said: "It is surely a mad world in which parents or grandparents are prepared to shell out tens of thousands to put their children through private schools to get them into universities and then to object to them paying a tuition fee of more than £3,000." His long-term preference would be for no cap at all, which could lead to universities charging up to £20,000 for some courses.

The chancellor's remarks coincided with a study for the HMC, carried out by Buckingham University's Centre for Education and Employment, which showed that independent schools were concentrating on "hard" A-level subjects such as further maths, rather than "soft" ones like media studies and psychology – which are more popular in comprehensive schools.

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