College statement on publication of University’s Admissions Report 2022

4 May 2022

Today the University of Oxford is publishing its Annual Admissions Statistical Report, drawing together data about undergraduate admissions for the University as a whole, and for individual colleges and subjects. The aggregated data by college and course is for the years 2017-2021.

A summary of the Report is available on the homepage of the University website and via the following link: http://www.ox.ac.uk/adstats.

The University publishes this information to increase transparency around the makeup of the undergraduate body at Oxford, and to inform and engage people about who studies at Oxford and where they come from.

We welcome this latest report, and its publication provides Jesus College with an opportunity to share information on the progress we are making towards creating a diverse student body.

We are committed to developing and maintaining a wide range of access programmes that reflect our values of inclusivity, equality, diversity and opportunity for all. We reach out to work with schools with little or no Oxbridge experience, and encourage applications from those with the academic potential, regardless of background.

We invest time and resources to increasing the diversity of our intake, especially in terms of relative socioeconomic disadvantage, minority ethnicities, and under-represented UK regions. Our access work focusses on equipping young people from under-represented backgrounds with the information, resources and motivation to make competitive applications. There is a real emphasis on academic engagement with pupils – tutorials, seminars, lecturers, mock-interviews – to give them a realistic taste of what studying at Oxford is like, and to encourage them to apply by showing that they could be a student at Oxford.

Learners from our Seren Summer School 2021 enjoy a tour around Oxford

 

In the academic year 2019-20 (and despite the pandemic), we engaged with just under 10,000 learners – an increase on the previous year – and the vast majority came from target backgrounds. In the academic year 2020-21 we increased our engagement once again to 10,500 individuals seen.

Our access work has four strategic components:

Collaboration

  • We work with well-established and high-quality providers of access initiatives. Our collaborators include organisations such as The Brilliant Club, IntoUniversity, the Reach Society, Equal Education, Masterclass Education, The Reactioneers, the Social Mobility Foundation, the Seren Network, Target Oxbridge, and Universify Education.
  • In association with the University’s Department for Continuing Education, we held our first access day for mature students in 2019, and are striving to do more in this area.
  • With New College and St Catherine’s College, we are founding members of the Oxford Cymru consortium, with responsibility for delivering school access programmes across all regions of Wales. This is an exciting development and an extension of the support we previously offered to regions in South Wales. Our work has been recognised recently by the actor Michael Sheen, who is generously supporting bursaries for disadvantaged students from Wales at the College.

Innovation

  • In 2020, Jesus College began leading a consortium of Colleges, with the University, to tackle the continuing under-representation of British Muslims in general, and British Bangladeshi and Pakistani students in particular, at Oxford. Over 600 young people have since been engaged in an innovative and sustained online outreach programme, utilising the latest web-conferencing software. Prospective students, as well as their parents and teachers are being offered support and guidance from the start to the finish of their university applications.
  • We offer innovative and impactful engagement opportunities for target students, such as our Women in Sciences’ taster days, which annually attract over 100 participants.
  • In 2022 we will offer over 500 summer school places to students from Wales. This makes Jesus College the largest provider of educational opportunities to Welsh students anywhere outside of Wales. 400 of these places will be taken on our online international summer school, 40 individuals will come from Pembrokeshire, Carmarthenshire  and Ceredigion for a residential school, and 75 will come for our flagship summer school in August.
  • In 2022 we will also be working with 100 students preparing for their GCSEs with an Easter School and a Summer School. In collaboration with Universify Education, these individuals have been selected from the poorest backgrounds, including a very high proportion from the worst represented ethnic minority groups.
  • In response to the pandemic, we dramatically increased our provision of digital outreach resources, in order to reach not only schools already engaged in our access programmes but potential future participants. In particular, we have substantially increased our offering on YouTube, with over 150 videos available to view. This has led to 10,000 new subscribers, and 1,000,000 views in a year. One of our most popular videos is an example of an Admissions interview which has been watched over 270,000 times.
  • We participate in Opportunity Oxford and help to host UNIQ pupils and events.
  • We will be accepting our first cohort of Foundation Oxford students in 2023.

Expansion

  • We recognise that the HE participation gap for underrepresented groups does not begin or have influence solely from the secondary stage of education. It is important to engage learners from a young age so that institutions such as Oxford are perceived as familiar and achievable early on. Therefore, since 2018 we have increased our work with primary schools and offer age-appropriate experiences to these age groups as we would for secondary and FE pupils.
  • In addition to expanding our work with younger students, we will also be expanding our work with older prospective students, as mature students often face a host of barriers to higher education.

Investment

  • In 2018 we expanded our human resources, hiring a full-time access assistant to support our Access Team.
  • We also have more students engaged with our access work and have created internships to create opportunities which benefit both our current students and prospective applicants.
  • In 2020 we launched a new bursary for disadvantaged Black British students supported by an alumnus
  • In 2021 we launched a new bursary for disadvantaged Welsh students supported by actor and activist Michael Sheen.

In summary, we are committed to increasing diversity at Jesus College, but appreciate that there are complex and multi-faceted reasons as to why certain groups remain under-represented. In response to these challenges, we can only offer partial solutions and will continue to collaborate with governments at local and national levels, with schools, and with third-sector providers of education services in order to fully uphold our ambitions of equity for all.

For more information on all our Access and Outreach work, click here. 

To find out more about our Equality and Diversity work, click here.