Fines for universities slammed by admissions don Professor Steven Schwartz "In the Schwartz report we tried to get universities to be more open to students from non-traditional backgrounds and we pretty much achieved that," he said. I don't know of any institution in England that has tried to resist that idea. But you have to have students that are recruitable. I think more and more that the solution to getting students from non-traditional backgrounds in to universities is to look at schools - it's not really about universities. The vice-chancellor said that the selective school system, which still operates in Australia, had been successful at putting working class pupils in to leading universities and that grammar education had its benefits. "There are fewer state school pupils in Oxbridge than in the 70s and that is presumably because there were more grammar schools then," he said. I am beginning to think that what they have done is destroy the pathways that allow children to move up and are now trying to retrospectively do something about it. His comments come as selective universities brace themselves for a new onslaught by Offa, under the controversial directorship of Professor Les Ebdon, the vice-chancellor of Bedfordshire University. The academic said he will take the "nuclear option" of levying financial penalties of up to £500,000 against institutions which fail to meet new recruitment targets for poorer students. But Professor Schwartz, the former vice chancellor of Brunel University, believes such fines would be useless and that "forcing universities to take students will not do much good if they can't do the work." "Forcing universities to take students will not do much good if they can't do the work," he said. "We thought Offa would be about strongly encouraging universities to provide bursaries to ensure less well off students could afford to come," he said. Sanctions would have a limited affect. They would only be useful if universities were really not trying to reach students from non-traditional backgrounds and I don't think there are many, if any, in that category. If you look at Cambridge, for instance, it is hard to think of anything that they have not done to attract and recruit more non-traditional applicants. The real problem is not university admissions but getting schools to prepare students properly so they can get through. The Schwartz Report, published in 2004, is regarded by many as higher education's "admissions bible." It paved the way for the widespread use of "contextual data" in admissions with universities flagging and often giving preferential offers to candidates who come from low-income families, attended schools with a poor academic record or live in neighbourhoods where few young people attend university. It recommends that universities look beyond A-levels to accept sixth-formers on the basis of "potential" as well as merit. Such action was justified because research suggests that "equal grades do not necessarily represent equal potential," it said. One of the experts consulted by Professor Schwartz was Professor Neil Rudenstine, the former head of Harvard University and an advocate of affirmative action, which has seen quota systems for black students operate at some US colleges.