It will become even more of a can of worms, even more unfair, and all in pursuit of fairness Figures from the Higher Education Statistical Agency pinpoint the problem. Across the UK, 88.7 per cent of British-based students starting an undergraduate degree in 2010-11 came from state schools. But at the most prestigious universities - Oxbridge and those in the exclusive Russell Group - the numbers tell another story. At Oxford, state pupils make up just 55.2 per cent of new entrants - only slightly up from 2000, when Magdalen College, Oxford, declined to offer a place to read medicine to straight A* high-flyer Laura Spence, from Monkseaton Community High School in Tyneside, and found itself publicly castigated by Gordon Brown for "scandalous elitism." At the time, some said politicians should keep away from individual cases; others that the future prime minister had usefully highlighted institutional discrimination. Spence eventually accepted a scholarship to go to Harvard. Cambridge is doing rather better than its age-old rival in widening access. In 2010-11, its state-school quota stood at 59 per cent. In figures for 2012, that has risen to 63.3 per cent, a 30-year high. "Our aim," says Mike Sewell, director of admissions at the university, "is to attract the very best quality of applicants and then treat them all fairly. The very last thing I would ever want to say to a parent of someone we offer a place to is that we are taking your son or daughter because of the school they went to. We offer places because we have confidence in that individual's academic ability. So why agree a state-private target figure with OFFA? "It is one of several targets we have agreed," Dr Sewell says. We also have targets for the number of students we accept from what are called low-participation neighbourhoods - areas where numbers going to university, or to Cambridge, are small. But, of course, not all applicants who come to us from those low-participation neighbourhoods will have been to state schools. Some may have been on scholarships to a local independent school. Some, perhaps, but not many. The Cambridge target figure for state school admissions has been set in the range of 61 to 63 per cent, even though 93 per cent of children in this country are educated in the state sector. "Over the past few years we have looked very hard at academic performance in UK schools, and in particular at A-level attainment," Dr Sewell explains. And from those figures we have extrapolated that of the number of pupils expected to reach our entry grade of three As, roughly 65 per cent will come from the state sector. That seems to me to be a fairer measurement of our admissions process. If the Cambridge research is to become the new benchmark, that still leaves other elite institutions - Durham (59.5 per cent), St Andrews (60.1), Bristol (60.2) and University College, London (63.5) - with ground to make up. But it handily takes the spotlight off university admissions and their perceived unfairness, and places it firmly back on levels of attainment at A-level in state schools. Why does that 7 per cent of schools that are private produce such a disproportionate number of candidates with 3 As at A-level? However, universities cannot quite so easily sidestep the intense scrutiny they are facing over admissions. With record numbers of applicants - last year showed a slight overall decline in those wanting to go to university, but 2010 had been an all-time peak - the job of admissions tutors remains a fraught one. "It is certainly true," says a recently retired dean of admissions at a Russell Group university, who would only speak publicly if her identity was not revealed, "that if we have someone applying from a private school with the requisite three As at A-level, but with mixed GCSEs, not all of them at A or A*, we will probably be more inclined to reject them than someone with a similar range of results from a state school. What leeway we have, we use there. This is when, she says, what is sometimes called "contextual data" is taken into account. "But the reality of university admissions," she continues, "especially in the most popular subjects such as law, English and psychology, is that you have so many applicants with the right grades, compared to the number of places, that there is very little leeway at all. From suitably qualified applicants, I could have filled all my places with people from Grub Street Comprehensive. Or I could have filled them with products of Eton. My job, at interview, was to try to strike a balance. And I do that not on the basis of social engineering, but by trying to work out who has a passion for the subject. The principal tool has been interviews, but she fears that in the brave new world of OFFA, such face-to-face encounters may soon be outlawed as potentially discriminatory - as they have been for admissions to oversubscribed secondary schools. "That will leave admissions tutors trying to make a decision on paper qualifications, a personal statement that someone else might have written for the candidate, and headteachers" reports, which vary wildly in quality. It will become even more of a can of worms, even more unfair, and all in pursuit of fairness. The accusation that there is currently a bias in Russell Group universities towards private school applicants is simply wrong, she maintains. We are not a group of old farts in tweed jackets choosing people who went to our old school, but we are not about to exclude a whole group of able applicants just because some might perceive them as Hooray Henrys. We teach at global universities and some admissions tutors come from overseas, or have been educated there. They will just not understand the gradations of the British school system when they read the word Eton. They will see an individual. All sides in the debate find rare accord in agreeing that it would be a big mistake to see applicants as representatives of a particular class, or type of school. But that is where OFFA's targets are taking them.