The University of Oxford Annual Admissions Statistical Report has been published today, drawing together data about undergraduate admissions for the University as a whole, and for individual colleges and subjects.
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. The aggregated data by college and course is for the years 2020-2022. A summary of the report is available on the University website here.
Jesus College welcomes this latest report, and its publication provides us with an opportunity to give an update on the progress we are making towards further diversifying the student body.
Background
We are committed to developing and delivering a wide range of access and outreach programmes that reflect our values of inclusivity, equality, diversity and opportunity for all. We have a dedicated Access Team which reaches out to work with schools with little or no Oxbridge experience, and encourages applications from young learners with academic potential, regardless of their background. Our link regions are Wales, Wandsworth and Lambeth.
Our access work focusses on equipping learners from under-represented backgrounds with the information, resources and motivation to make competitive applications. There is a real emphasis on academic engagement, for example tutorials, seminars, lecturers, and mock-interviews, to give school students a realistic taste of what studying at Oxford is like, and to encourage them to apply by demonstrating that they have the academic ability to become a student at Oxford, or another leading university in the UK or abroad.
We continue to build relationships, and work in collaboration with well-established and high-quality providers of access initiatives, as well as developing and delivering our own access and outreach programmes.
Programmes
Notable amongst our ongoing access programmes are:
- Prospective students with Black African or Black Caribbean heritage
We remain committed to encouraging more applications from, and making offers to, students with Black African and Black Caribbean heritage, and this has been a priority for our access work in recent years. In addition to providing continuous support to the University’s Target Oxbridge initiative, the College is also supporting (for the second year) the Thinking Black initiative, of which a Jesus alumna is the current Secretary. We have also developed a mentoring programme with East London Connect, a charity that aims to raise aspiration for young people in underrepresented groups, especially those of African-Caribbean heritage. The programme connects current Jesus undergraduates with young people living in and around East London, and provides opportunities for them to meet, chat and learn more about being a student at Oxford. Most recently, we have begun a partnership with the KINShiP Bursary. KINShiP delivers coaching programmes, mentorship schemes and bursaries to support young women of colour with opportunities to succeed in education and their future careers, and Jesus has sponsored an upcoming access visit to Oxford by its members. We have also begun supporting a First Class Nation initiative called Dearyoungers, which aims to support and encourage young Black men previously excluded from education back into the classroom and on to university, and the College is working with Parent Power Cardiff to raise aspirations and attainment amongst that city’s British Somali population.
- The British Bangladeshi and Pakistani Programme (BBPP)
The British Bangladeshi and Pakistani Programme (BBPP) is a programme led by Jesus College, that aims to tackle the continuing under-representation of British Muslims in general, and British Bangladeshi and Pakistani students in particular, at Oxford. The programme, delivered through targeted school visits, supports high-achieving students to make empowered choices about their own higher education. Our most recent BBPP project has been with the Tower Hamlets Education Partnership, which helped us reach out to local state secondary schools in the borough to nominate talented students who we’ll work with over the next 10 months. In total, the BBPP has engaged with over 250 students since it was created in 2020.
- Welsh Access Programmes
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. We work closely with the Welsh Government’s Seren Network, and host the annual Seren Summer Schools here at Jesus. In 2022, we offered over 500 Summer School places to disadvantaged students from Wales, making the College the largest provider of educational opportunities to Welsh students anywhere outside of Wales. Over one-fifth of all current Welsh students at Oxford previously participated in our residential summer school.
- Digital engagement programme
Our dedicated Jesus Access YouTube channel is home to a wide range of video content that aims to inform and support prospective Oxford students as they navigate their way through subject choices, the applications process, and interviews and tests. It also provides content that aims to demystify the Oxford student experience; presenting tours of the city and Colleges, and sample lectures in subjects as broad as ‘Can justice be engineered?’ and ‘Women in early Islamic Religious Life’. The channel is the most subscribed (16.1k) across Oxbridge, with over a million views of videos every year.
- Astrophoria Foundation Year
Jesus College is one of ten Oxford colleges to join the new Astrophoria Foundation Year programme which offers a one-year foundation course to UK state school students with significant academic potential, but who have experienced severe personal disadvantage and/or disrupted education that has resulted in them being unable to apply to the University. The course aims to motivate them to reach their academic potential through a challenging but supportive academic curriculum that develops their skills, self-belief and confidence. We will welcome three Astrophoria students to Jesus College for the 2023/24 academic year.
Collaboration with partner organisations who share our ambition to widen access is key to the success of our work. In addition to those organisations already mentioned, we also work with:
The Brilliant Club, IntoUniversity, Universify Education, Reach Society, Equal Education, UNIQ, Opportunity Oxford, The Reactioneers, and the Social Mobility Foundation
The result is that in the academic year 2021-22, we engaged with over 12,500 learners through our access initiatives and programmes – an increase of 2,500 on the previous year – and the vast majority of those young people came from target backgrounds.
The Annual Admissions Statistical Report shows encouraging data on the impact of the College’s access work over the past three years, for example 25.4% of UK students joining us came from a BME background, and 14.2% from an Asian background. 7.1% of students admitted for the 2022/23 academic year came from a background where they met the eligibility criteria for free school meals.
The numbers of UK students with Black African or Black Caribbean heritage admitted to Oxford increased from 2.6% in 2018 to 3.3% in 2022, in line with the wider picture across all UK universities. At Jesus College, we remain committed to encouraging more applications from, and making offers to, students with Black African or Black Caribbean heritage. We will do this by continuing to strengthen our connections with organisations, initiatives and schools who share our goal, and work closely with them, and the prospective students we engage with, to further understand the barriers that may prevent them from applying. Through the work of the College’s Academic Office, and the Equality & Diversity Committee, we will also continue to ensure that our policies, practices, activities and decisions meet the needs of all current and prospective members of our community.
For more information on all our Access and Outreach work, click here.
For more information on our new five-year Strategic Plan, click here.