4 2GM Wednesday February 23 2022 | the times
News
Pop property David Hockney’s Garrowby Hill, being sold by the singer Robbie Williams, is expected to make up to £10.5 million at Sotheby’s in London next Wednesday
Heart attack risk test
A cheap blood test could save the
lives of thousands of heart attack
patients every year, a study
published in Plos Medicine found.
Measuring CRP, a protein that
indicates inflammation, predicted
risk of death in the three years
after a heart attack. The British
Heart Foundation, which funded
the study, said it could allow
doctors to monitor those at risk.Assisted suicide arrests
Two people have been arrested
after the death of a campaigner
for assisted dying. Sharon
Johnston, 60, of Cardigan, west
Wales, who was severely disabled
after a fall, died in Switzerland.
Dyfed-Powys police said that a
woman aged 29 from London and
one aged 69 from Cardiff were
being held on suspicion of
assisting or encouraging suicide.Dementia and hearing
Hearing aids may reduce the risk
of cognitive decline and dementia.
Older people with hearing loss
are more than twice as likely to
develop mild cognitive
impairment, a precursor to
dementia, according to a report in
Alzheimer’s and Dementia:
Translational Research and Clinical
Interventions. The raised risk was
erased if they wore hearing aids.Grenfell fire report
The organisation that tested the
Grenfell Tower cladding
appeared to “copy and paste” the
outcome of an annual fire report,
an inquiry into the fire that killed
72 people has found. The inquiry
was told that the Building
Research Establishment, hired by
the government to carry out fire
testing, had the same “synopsis of
findings” between 2001 and 2015.‘Make Lords quit at 75’
Members of the House of Lords
would have to retire at 75 under a
proposed law aimed at reducing
the size of the chamber. There is
no formal retirement age for
members though they can
voluntarily retire. Jerome
Mayhew, a Conservative MP, said
reform was needed as the Lords
was “too large”and there was
“public anger” at peers’
attendance allowances of up to
£323 a day. Mayhew said his
planned law would cut the
number of seats from 813 to 496.AAAADE E E
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PRRRS TTTSolve all five clues using each
letter underneath once only1 Saying, proverb (5)2 Big (5)3 Edible pulse (6)4 Cachet, distinction (8)5 Relating to time (8)Quintagram®No 1246
Solutions MindGames in Times
Cryptic clues Page 10 of TimesTOLGA AKMEN/AFP/GETTY IMAGESMany of Britain’s leading universities
have had a slowdown in their state-
school intake while Oxford and Cam-
bridge pull ahead, figures show.
Seventy per cent of undergraduates
starting at Cambridge in 2020, and al-
most 69 per cent at Oxford, were from
state schools, according to data from the
Higher Education Statistics Agency.
However, Russell Group universities
including Durham, Edinburgh, St An-
drews, Imperial, Exeter and University
College London all took less than
68 per cent of their intake from state
schools. For some, the figures were
Oxford and Cambridge pull ahead on state-school entry
worse than in previous years. A-level
results were higher last year and in
2020 after exams were replaced with
assessment. This led to significant
grade inflation, with 45 per cent of the
exams graded A or A*. Some independ-
ent and grammar schools saw a partic-
ularly large increase in grades.
Analysis by The Times shows that
Durham University’s state school in-
take was down from 65.7 per cent in
2018 to 61.6 in 2020. Edinburgh’s de-
clined from 65.4 to 64.5 per cent. St An-
drews fell from 65.4 to 63.1 per cent and
Imperial from 67.1 to 65.8 per cent. Ex-
eter increased from 64.7 to 65.5 per cent
but was still lower than its state schoolintake in 2017 of 65.9 per cent. UCL
showed an increase from 2018 (65.9 to
67.6 per cent) but the figure was lower
than its 2017 intake of 69.8 per cent.
Of young people starting university
in 2020-21, 90.2 per cent were educated
at state schools — a rise of 0.1 percent-
age points. At some institutions, just
over a third of UK students who started
full-time undergraduate courses in
2020 were from state schools, while at
others all students were state-educated.
John Blake, director for fair access at
the Office for Students, said universi-
ties needed to “redouble efforts” to en-
sure their doors were open to students
from disadvantaged backgrounds.Nicola Woolcock, Matilda Davies
Pupils who fail GCSE English and
maths will be banned from taking
student loans under government plans
to be announced this week, it was
reported last night.
Ministers are also seeking to limit
student numbers as part of a clamp-
down on low-quality degrees.
The Department for Education
(DfE) proposals, which will be put to
consultation, will include new mini-
mum entry requirements for university
to ensure pupils “aren’t being pushed
into higher education before they are
ready”.
The reforms mark a reversal of New
Labour and coalition government
policies which sought to encourage
more people to go to university.
Under the proposals, reported by The
Daily Telegraph, students who fail to
achieve a Grade 4 — equivalent to a C
Pupils who fail English and maths
‘will be barred from student loans’
in the previous system — in maths and
English GCSEs will be barred from
accessing student loans. The ban could
also be imposed on those who fail to
achieve two Es at A-level. There would
be exceptions for certain people, such
as mature students.
Ministers are said to want to ensure
that “poor-quality, low-cost courses
aren’t incentivised to grow uncontrol-
lably”. They are likely to focus on
courses that lead to a low proportion of
students getting a graduate job and
those with a high rate of dropouts.
University leaders have warned that
setting minimum entry requirements
too high, such as requiring a grade 5 in
GCSE maths and English, would, in
effect, price out many school leavers
from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The announcement comes as the
government prepares to publish the
final part of its response to the Augar
review into higher education funding.The response is said to include a
consultation on minimum entry
requirements for students to be eligible
for government-backed loans for tuition
and maintenance.
The number of students at university
used to be tightly controlled but the cap
began to be lifted after tuition fees
tripled to £9,000 in 2012. Within three
years, the cap was lifted altogether.
The DfE has been battling with the
Treasury over the cost of universities
for nearly three years since the review
led by the former equities broker Sir
Philip Augar was published during
Theresa May’s premiership.
Nadhim Zahawi, the education
secretary, will announce a £900 million
investment this week in subjects that
support the NHS, such as medicine,
dentistry, nursing and midwifery, as
well as science and engineering degrees
— the biggest single rise in university
funding for ten years. Other expectedmeasures include the freezing of the tu-
ition fee at £9,250 for another two years,
until the end of the current parliament.
The new entry thresholds for
university are widely seen as a means of
reining in student loan debt, with out-
standing loans reaching £140 billion in- The government plans come
after the Office for Students regulator
threatened universities and colleges in
England with fines and restrictions on
their access to student loan funding in a
move to eliminate “low-quality” courses.
According to the DfE, less than half
of students at 25 British universities
who begin a degree can expect to finish
it and find professional employment or
further study within 15 months of grad-
uation. A spokesman said: “Higher edu-
cation is an investment and we need to
ensure that graduates are being re-
warded... with an educational experi-
ence and jobs that match their skills
and help contribute to the economy.”
Kieran Gair
6 Academics are self-censoring to
avoid causing offence to students from
authoritarian states such as China, a
report says. Two thirds believed that
academic freedom was under threat in
higher education and more than two
fifths felt the same about their freedom
to select teaching content. Academics
from Oxford, Exeter and Portsmouth
universities surveyed 1,500 academics
working in social science faculties.
Their report, published in the Inter-
national Journal of Human Rights,
suggested that the issue had become
more acute because online teaching
during the pandemic had increased
opportunities for surveillance.