University Personal Statement

I have written before about education. Since writing that I have become more and more convinced that we have it wrong and that something closer to what I have suggested is right. I will come back to this sometime and put it into the Utopia manifesto.

Recently I have been watching my son apply to University. An experience I never had to go through. When I was at school it was made very clear to me that University wasn’t for people like me with low grades and disruptive behaviour. The careers advisor suggested to me; builder or soldier. Both choices I rejected out of hand, but now with hindsight I wish I had picked one of them. Maybe soldier rather than builder.

So I never went to University, my experience of Univeristy comes from working at a Bristol University when I was 40ish. This was a job I took for various reasons, but one was that I felt excited to be moving into the not for profit sector. All my previous roles had been for FTSE100 companies or their advisors. The job I was in meant I logged in every day to the company home page where the share price and the market graphs were the first thing you saw. What else mattered.

My 5 years at Bristol left me profoundly disappointed with the UKs University sector and I left feeling more inclined that perhaps the focus of profit did give organisations some form of direction, as it was clearly lacking at Bristol wrapped up as it seemed to be with petty squabbles, and ineffective leadership and decision making.

Bristol is a Russell Group university. The Russell Group being the 20 or so Univeristies that were Universities before the Government deregulated the education sector and allowed anyone and everyone providing degree level education to call themselves a University.

Historically, there were the Univeristies and then colleges or polytechnics. It was clearly understood that these were levels within further education. University being the best.

With hindsight we know that not to be true. Universities didn’t take the best or the cleverest kids, but mainly those with the most money or hereditary connections, and many of them being the absolute thickest and laziest. But that’s a different issue.

However there remains a difference with the Russell Group. The majority of research funding still goes to them, as opposed to other Universities. So a snobbery remains that they are still the preeminent places to go for an education.

However preeminent is a misnomer. In some cases research and research funding is what matters. Science can be taught, but advanced science is doing experiments that take you outside and beyond the edges of current knowledge. That needs research funding. But teaching Doctors, as Bristol University does, and teaching nurses, that the old Bristol poly (UWE) does, seems equally valuable to me. And if the quality of teaching at UWE is better than anywhere else, the research funding and snobbery doesn’t count for much.

Some of the academic research at Russell Group Universities is truly breathtaking. I met one professor who told me that in the 1970s he did some research work that was funded by Securicor, the company responsible for moving paper cash and gold between banks. They wanted a way of sending messages from the moving vans back to their head office. His research team developed a way of sending data signals wirelessly from the vans. Securicor were happy, and he tried to promote his research to other companies.

He told me that he remembers telling people that using this technology, one day you’d be able to watch TV in your car and he was laughed at. The idea was so preposterous and that even if it could happen, it was so dangerous it would be made illegal.

However, he said that there was one company interested. It was a Finnish company who specialised in paper and rubber and he couldn’t understand why they wanted it. But they took it. That company was called Nokia. You cannot join the dots when they’re happening, only when looking back do they make sense.

The snobbery at Bristol seemed to me to be a factor that was holding it back. Just because you had a good reputation historically, doesn’t mean that it will continue if you have low grade teaching and poor student experience today. And ultimately, if you’ve mortgaged off all of your buildings because everything is so poor and you need money to upgrade, then there may come a day when your income falls due to your piss poor teaching and you need to be rescued by a University with money, such as one from Beijing or the Emirates. I don’t want either of these things to happen in Bristol, but I wonder if they are on that path and unable to change due to their arrogance. Time will tell. I hope I’m wrong.

But what do I know. I was in the back office, not the academic side. Although between the two the academic side was the best part. The back office was truly dysfunctional, especially when it came to its people.

Watching my sons experience hasn’t improved my view of Univeristy. My parents told me that Oxford University consider kids from state schools such as the one my kids go to as a “deprived background”. If that’s true I think that’s horrifying.

Then my son applied for medical courses. Something I believed he would be exceptional at. I believe he would have made an excellent doctor and maybe one who could have made a real difference either to the profession or to peoples lives. But I watched and I saw a profession with invisible barriers which also kept out children who's parents didn’t go to University and who weren’t able to get a shoe in to medical experience because their parents weren’t already a doctor.

As a country we bemoan the lack of Doctors while Doctors and the University system keep those numbers low and exclude people who could be excellent Doctors.

So he pivoted and instead applied for different courses relating to things that he tends to talk to me about quite a lot. Subjects relating to people, society, politics, philosophy and economics And the general unfairness within society and it’s structures.

As you do with University applications you have to write a single personal statement for the course you want to do. Thats not easy. Some of the examples online were horrifying. One sucessful example talked about how the person was lucky enough to go to school in Switzerland and Malaysia before getting work experience at their dads hedge fund. Imagine being a working class kid and reading that. These are not so subtle things that reinforce exclusion and perpetuate system racism in our society.

Anyway, my son did his personal statement, I helped him with a few edits. We could have improved it still but it had to be in by the deadline and it had to meet the strict word count. In the end, it was sucessful for an LSE course called International Social and Public Policy with Politics. Here it is unedited.

PERSONAL STATEMENT

It is the volatile nature of politics and the pragmatic solution that social policy offers that makes it such an interesting subject for me.

Two connected topics which highlight my interest in this field is the growing cost of living and shrinking wages, and the paradoxical nature in which homelesness has become more prevalent alongside the increase in wealth of the already wealthy, for example the increase in second homes ownership in recent years. Both topics are essentially the wealth inequality gap.

The reason this subject excites me is because wealth inequality and poverty is an umbrella under which mental health, education, substance abuse and the effects from climate change are all exacerbated and all of these issues are highly pertinent today and are pressing issues for all Governments of developed nations.

My interest in this area prompted me to read Darren McGarvey’s ’Poverty Safari’ which gave me a deeper insight on how the cycle of poverty damages a person and how difficult it is to break from one generation to the next. This led onto me writing my EPQ on the ‘Health Effects of Chronic Loneliness’. I studied how changes in the way we live have weakened our social fabric and connection, for example, decreasing attendance at church has increased isolation in rural towns. Social policy in some European countries has sought to re-connect generations through combining care homes and student accommodation, removing student fees in return for social care.

As well as my reading and research I volunteered at a homeless charity where I helped to deliver food to the homeless in Bristol. Independently of my charity work, I set up donation points, and my team came runners up in a local charitable awards scheme for our involvement with the charity.

Listening to a podcast on pathways to a healthier society led me to read more about Universal Basic Income (UBI), which in multiple studies is proving more effective in dealing with poverty than many welfare systems. Counterintuitively it even proves itself to be economically beneficial in developing countries, where it has allowed people to start businesses, increasing income for families by 38%. The political precariousness of rising wealth inequality may soon provoke a fresh look at UBI and our social policy around state benefits.

Aware that I am heavily exposed to a left wing social media bubble I have taken the opportunity to see the political process up close, making the effort to gain exposure from the left and right of the political spectrum. When I was 15 I decided to attend a Brexit rally as I wanted to see the oration skills of Nigel Farage. I also attended a debate hosted by right wing commentator Darren Grimes and Turning Point UK. These experiences gave me an insight into how social policy alone is not enough, it also needs to be explained by skillful political actors if it is to be successfully used.

My interest in studying social policy is underpinned by a real interest in politics. Oscar Wilde said “Progress is the realisation of Utopias”. For me, politics should be the pursuit of utopanist thinking, especially in social policy. Policy should improve the lives of everyone. Rutger Bregman’s ‘Utopia for Realists’ book encompasses what I believe is missing from our current politics, where the parties are focused on re-election, job security, and personal enrichment rather than the pursuit of a utopia for all and for these reasons, to date I have decided not to join any political party.

However, I have been an active supporter of Extinction Rebellion (XR) and School Strike for Climate, including marching with Greta Thunburg on her visit to Bristol in February 2020. Seeing and feeling the anger within my peers on being handed an impending catastrophe, then seeing the relative inaction at COP26 just makes me more determined to study subjects where I can find a way in which to evoke real change.

In my gap year, I am working and taking extra classes to improve my Spanish and to learn French. I have also completed Bronze and Silver Duke of Edinburgh awards and taught first aid in school, both of which helped my leadership and communication skills. I think that both skills will be invaluable in future as politics and social policy all require leadership and communication, whether thats in forming policy behind closed doors, or persuading the general public of a policy decision.

I am passionate about people, politics and society, and the behaviour and policies that shape our lives for the better. I am really hopeful for the opportunity to study these subjects further at university.