Ofsted: schools must push bright pupils towards Oxbridge Next month, the regulator will publish a major report into the reasons why many comprehensives are letting down the most able pupils. Sir Michael said that national targets should be set to encourage more teenagers form state schools to get places at leading universities. He told The Sunday Times that the report is also likely to make a series of other suggestions, including encouraging secondary schools to identify bright children in the final year of primary education and track them between the age of 11 and 16 to make sure they fulfil their potential. Schools may be told to ensure able pupils sit the toughest A-level subjects that are currently seen as a route into top universities, it emerged. Other recommendations are likely to cover a greater use of streaming - when children are set by ability for all lessons - rather than teaching in mixed-ability groups. This follows comments by Sir Michael last year when he warned that mixed-ability classes were a "curse" on both bright and low-skilled pupils. According to previous Ofsted figures, just 45 per cent of the 22,834 lessons observed by inspectors in 2010/11 employed some form of setting by ability. It represents a drop compared with 46 per cent in 2008/09 and 47 per cent in 2000/01, it was revealed. "It will be a ground-breaking report that will say some important things about the standard of provision for our most able pupils," he said. It's a big issue for our country. Do we need more youngsters from the state system to get into universities? Yes, we do. Figures published earlier this year showed that almost half of Britain's leading universities recruited fewer students from state schools last year. Some 11 members of the Russell Group granted more places over to privately-educated pupils in 2011/12, including Bristol, Cambridge, Durham, Imperial College London, Warwick and York, it emerged. But Sir Michael insisted that the report would not advocate the systematic lowering of entry requirements for students from poor-performing schools. The former principal of Mossbourne Community Academy in Hackney said that in his former post he regularly "spoke to the admissions tutors at Cambridge and they were clear it would be really unfair to the children to accept them with lower qualifications than were necessary to do the course." "It would be unfair of them; they wouldn't be able to cope," he said. That's the key issue: we don't want tokenism, we want our best and brightest top get there on merit. Ofsted will also publish a second report next month into the gap in results between pupils from poor backgrounds and affluent classmates. Sir Michael said: "If we are going to be a world-class education system, we have got to do something about the long tail of underperformance - affecting around one-in-five children - which has bedevilled our system for a long time."