College Statement on Undergraduate Admissions Data

11 May 2021

The University of Oxford has today published 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 2018-2020. 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 have made towards creating a diverse student body, representative of the wide distribution of academic abilities and potential in society.

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 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.

In the academic year 2019-20 and despite the pandemic, we engaged with just under 10,000 school pupils – an increase on the previous year – and the vast majority came from target backgrounds.

Our access work has several 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, 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.
  • In collaboration with New College and St Catherine’s College, we lead 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 Martin Sheen who has generously donated to create 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 500 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 200 participants.
  • In response to the pandemic, we have grown 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 100 videos available to view. This has led to 4,000 new subscribers, and 25,000 views per month.

 

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 2019, we piloted a summer school in collaboration with Universify Education. This was targeted at disadvantaged Londoners in year 10 at school. The first year catered to 20 young people, this expanded to 30 in 2020, will cater to 50 in 2021, and 75 in 2022.

 

Investment

  • We have 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 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.