Overcoming Class Barriers In Cambridge

I grew up in council housing in South London in a single-parent family and attended a local state school. My family and those around me struggled financially, I assumed this was the norm. Where and how I grew up is either stigmatised or sensationalised. There is a lot I choose not to share about my personal experiences of poverty and deprivation, both to respect those I grew up with and to avoid reinforcing ideas of 'trauma porn'.

Educationally speaking, I didn't know what university was until I was fifteen. I was not 'gifted' nor 'talented' at school, more uninterested and unmotivated. I surprised myself with good GCSE results, although these were relatively below the average of those who attend Cambridge. I gained a spark of motivation after wondering what I could have achieved if I put the effort in. Moving school for my A-levels brought with it a fresh start and a fresh insight. By studying sociology at a 'good' school, I gained first-hand experience of the way in which social reproduction played out in education. I found myself studying alongside people whose parents owned homes, possessed multiple degrees and engaged in 'the arts'. 

I began studying Education at Homerton in 2013 with the sole purpose of making higher education more accessible to people who look and speak like me. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with Cambridge and found my way back here this year to do a PhD. My research focuses on conceptualisations of class, social mobility and the role of higher education in influencing these.

Ms Éireann Attridge
PhD Researcher in Education
ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership

My maternal grandfather was a tanner, my paternal grandfather a tin-smith. My mother left school aged 13 to work "in service" as a maid to a middle-class family; most of her life she was a waitress and an office-cleaner. My father left school aged 13; he spent his working life servicing bus engines, then in retirement working part-time as a school cleaner.        

Our terraced house, built around 1900, provided basic accommodation. My two sisters shared a bed in the front bedroom. To access my bedroom I had to go through my parents’ bedroom. We had no bathroom, shower, or indoor toilet. To pee at night, you used a potty kept under the bed, emptied daily in the outside toilet. Without a bathroom, we had to wash in the kitchen-sink. For a thorough wash, we had a tin bath, kept in the garden shed and brought into the kitchen or in front of the fire in the living room. Because both of my parents had left school when they were 13 years old, they were not “bookish”; we had perhaps a dozen books kept in a display case for china crockery.

My two elder sisters and I attended the Methodist Primary School. My sisters passed their 11+ exams and went to a grammar school for girls, leaving aged 14 and 15: one becoming a telephonist, the other, a secretary. When I passed my 11+, my parents were persuaded by my headteacher to allow me to take up a scholarship place at Kent College, a fee-paying and largely-boarding Direct Grant school. Good teaching there helped me to obtain nine passes at GCE Ordinary Level and then three passes at Advanced Level, as well as a State Scholarship. Encouraged by these results and by my school-masters, I applied for admission to Trinity College, Cambridge, and to St Edmund Hall, Oxford. After sitting the entrance exam at the former and being interviewed at both colleges, I was not offered a place at either. National academic recognition in a prestigious State Scholarship was, it seemed to me then and now, trumped by my working-class origins.

I went instead to University College London, to gain a BA, a Ph.D, and a Lectureship. In 1966, I took up a Lectureship at Cambridge; in 1970, I was elected a Fellow of Emmanuel College, becoming one of its Tutors in 1973 and its Senior Tutor from 1976 to 1986.

Dr Alan Baker FBA
Life Fellow, Former Senior Tutor, Emmanuel College
Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques
Honorary Member of the Société Géographique de Paris

Background

My father was a compositor in a printing works, mother a shop assistant. Neither they nor any member of my extended family had stayed on at school after age 14. The bath was under the kitchen table supplied by pans of water from the stove, and we had few luxuries, but there was always good food on the table. Both parents were politically active in the local Labour Party, and my father loved to talk about politics and his political heroes like Bevin and Bevan.

Social mobility

I passed the 11 plus and went to Warwick School – a ‘direct grant’ grammar school with half  ‘scholarship boys’ who (somewhat ironically?) were looked down on by the other half who were fee paying. In spite of some persistent bullying I thrived on the academic work. The school’s great ambition, which I was happy to share, was to have its students win scholarships at Oxbridge colleges. I failed on my first three attempts, but I stayed on for an extra term (which I was able to do because I was still young) and finally won an Exhibition to read History at Jesus College Oxford in 1960.

How I coped with Oxford

Though still attached to my working class family roots, three things worked in my favour:

(i)         my school history teachers had given me an excellent grounding and I quickly found that the demands of at least the first year were well within my grasp;

(ii)        Jesus College drew heavily from Welsh grammar schools, and though the Welsh are not immune from snobbery, they had little patience with the peculiarly English brand. When I did encounter this, I responded with a sharp rebuttal or I shook my head with an air of pitying incredulity!

(iii)       and most importantly, between school and university I had managed to get a job teaching English in the Berlitz School in Paris. I found myself among an incredibly cosmopolitan community and meeting (and having to engage in 50 minute conversations with) people from every walk of life. And I had to support myself through this. All this ‘worldly’ experience gave me great self-confidence, when I arrived at Oxford to mix with students most of whom had come straight from school.

The University level activity in drama, sport or politics was, nevertheless, quite daunting, but the Oxbridge college system gives you the chance to do pretty well anything on a smaller stage. I did – in abundance – and loved it.

What then?

A PGCE at London – teaching history – a Diploma in Philosophy of Education – a lectureship at Homerton – a Chair at University of East Anglia -- Dean of the School of Education and then Pro-Vice Chancellor – first retirement – Director of the Von Hügel Institute at St Edmund’s College and Director of the Association of Universities in the East of England – second and third retirements – Professorial Fellow and Director of Research (Mongolia and Kazakhstan) in the Cambridge University Faculty of Education – fourth retirement.

Professor David Bridges
Emeritus Professor UEA, former Dean of the School of Education, former Pro Vice Chancellor
Former Director of Research in the University of Cambridge Faculty of Education

I grew up just outside Manchester. My mum spent her early years living in central Manchester, until those ‘slum’ areas were cleared and her family was moved to Wythenshawe – then the new ‘garden city’. My dad grew up in Chorlton. When my brother was young, my parents lived in a council flat, but they had aspirations to own a house and, helped with a loan from one of my dad’s brothers who worked on the trains, they bought that house. Both of my parents left school before A-levels, not through any lack of intelligence. My dad started out working in the Kellogg’s factory and then British Airways cargo at Manchester Airport, becoming a union rep for the GMB. My mum trained as a machinist in a clothes factory, but work was poorly paid.

As a small child, my primary school wasn’t in the best shape, so my parents decided to send me to the local private school. To fund it, my mum took several cleaning jobs. I was then fortunate enough to go to a state grammar school for secondary. With encouragement from teachers, I managed to get into Cambridge to read History, one of six in my year, and the only one whose parents had not gone to university – in fact most of the six had parents who had been to Oxbridge.

Once at Cambridge, I found the transition very difficult. I lacked confidence, and I was always worried I would fail. People were nice and one supervisor in particular gave me a lot of help, but there was very little structured support – you’d made it to Cambridge; you would be fine. I can see now how isolated I felt. I had that feeling that many are familiar with: of not quite belonging either in the world you’ve entered or in the world you’ve left. In career terms, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I did well academically and moved into academia; I remember part of my motivation was also that I didn’t think I would be able to afford to live in London, where all the jobs seemed to be. Truth be told, I was pretty scared and had no idea what to do. As an academic, I have partially segued into working in admissions, recruitment and widening participation, and I am passionate about encouraging people like me to apply to Cambridge, and particularly about my home city, as well as in helping students from under-represented backgrounds with the transition to life at Cambridge.

Dr Caroline Burt
Department of History
Director of Admissions, Pembroke College

I grew up in Australia and we moved around a lot because my Dad was in the army. Both my parents worked two jobs (one during the day and one at night) to support us. No one from my Australian family had gone to University before and I didn’t have any aspirations to go to University and most of my friends were happy to spend the rest of their lives in the same neighbourhood they grew up in. After a messy divorce, my sister and myself moved to Melbourne to live with my Dad which was easily the worst period of my life and it was a very unhappy house with little optimism for the future. I managed to get into a small technical University in Melbourne, but my first year was poor. I didn’t feel like I belonged there, my marks were not good and I was given a warning that they were going to ask me to leave. During the break between first and second year, my girlfriend inspired me to look at my future and to re-assess my priorities and it was a life-changing conversation. From that moment onwards I turned my life around and worked as hard as I could at University, where I got the highest mark in the entire year for second and third year, then transferred to the most prestigious University in Melbourne and graduated with a first class honours degree. It was the first time in my life I felt genuinely valued and the first time I had options in life.

I moved to Sydney to undertake a PhD and then subsequently spent four years at Harvard Medical School in the US doing postdoctoral training. I got recruited to Cancer Research UK and University of Cambridge as faculty in 2007 and I have been running my lab for more than 15 years. I am now the Professor of Molecular Oncology at the University of Cambridge, a Senior group leader at Cancer Research UK and a Fellow at Clare College. I am also the academic head of the breast cancer programme in Cambridge. My upbringing, although not ideal, was a major motivator for me during my career and I am not sure I would have been as incentivised to succeed if I didn’t have the background I did. As an Australian I enjoy life and try to treat people well and this, coupled with hard work, has given me a life and a career that I never thought was possible when I was young.

Professor Jason S. Carroll, PhD FMedSci
Professor of Molecular Oncology

My mother worked in a dry-cleaning factory; my father, after a stint as a milkman, was a door-to-door insurance salesman. They left school at 15 and 14 respectively and have not a single formal qualification between them but they worked, constantly. I grew up in the white, working class, Sun-reading conservative heartlands of south Essex – my childhood constituency had the third highest vote for Brexit in the UK; coincidentally (?), it also has the third lowest graduate population. No-one I knew growing up thought more about going to university – any university – than they thought about going to Mars. Higher education existed in a perfect conceptual vacuum. Not one of my schoolfriends went to university, nor, indeed, to Mars. The ambition of my particular comprehensive school was to get us into a job at 16 or 18, and if it was entry-level white-collar, you’d made it. Which is what, with my two E-grade A-levels, I happily took.

After about five years of this, including a few modest promotions and pay rises, I thought it might be fun to take some Open University courses. I took a one-year access course first and then an OU course called The Nineteenth-Century Novel and its Legacy. With that and the results of a couple more OU literature courses I was qualified to apply to York University as a mature student, which I did aged 26. I returned to full-time work in the Civil Service while self-funding my Master’s over two years at Birkbeck College, before commencing my PhD at Cambridge with an AHRC studentship. I have been lecturer in English at Homerton College since 2002.

Dr David Clifford
Tutor and Senior Lecturer in English, Homerton
Subject Convenor for English Admissions

I grew up on my extended family's small dairy farm in rural Maryland; in fact, I was the only the third person to leave the county by choice since my ancestors settled there in the 1700s. My grandparents were what I would call subsistence farmers—that is, they grew the feed the 88 cows and our chickens needed, sold the cow's milk, and lived modestly off those proceeds. When they came of age, my uncles and my dad built their houses on small parcels of land that weren't fertile enough for growing corn or alfalfa. Education was not a high priority; nobody objected to it, but hard physical work outdoors, a close family, and a quiet, steadfast commitment to the God of the Christian Bible were all they saw as necessary for a good life. My dad did do a vocational course after finishing school and went to work at a local printing company, but that was because he was 'the smart one'; and my youngest uncle went to university in the 1960s, making decisions there that caused my grandparents a great deal of pain. But they continued to support all of us with prayer, Sunday dinners, and regular letters when I went to Virginia Tech. I'm sure they thought I would return 'home' (in fact they asked, often), and I did, but only after I had taught in Virginia for a while, married a US Marine, returned to Virginia Tech for a Master’s degree, and had a baby with special needs. My husband had never really settled on a career path after leaving the service, so I figured I needed a job with a steady income and a retirement plan. I needed help, and they needed to spoil my kid, so we returned to the farm while I pursued a PhD in Human Sciences and then left again to take up a job at Illinois State University. When I was asked to apply for the position I currently hold, I did what my family and I have always done—I prayed about it, told the Lord I'm happy to go, happy to stay. And yet, even this past year, one of my great-aunts cornered me at a Christmas gathering to ask why I had left them. I told her that this was where God called me to be. It was the only true answer.

Professor Karen Coats
Director of the Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at Cambridge

In my formative years I was brought up on welfare by a mother who had been a Japanese Prisoner of War, and who suffered extreme mental illness as a result. This caused her to move around the country and to keep me away from school. I experienced severe child poverty, and my early education was severely disrupted because of our moves. I was unable to afford to take a first degree and instead completed an HND in Computer Studies (distinction) to get into industry as quickly as possible.  It was only later after a successful career as computer scientist and entrepreneur, and exiting from my business though a management buy-out (2007), that I was able to undertake my first degree the same year at Oxford and enter academia after completing my PhD at Cambridge.

I completed my Doctorate here at Cambridge (ASNaC) in 2021 at Sidney Sussex as a mature student after successfully completing an MA in English Language and Literature at Oxford (2007) and an MA (Res) in Medieval Studies (2011) at the University of Reading (distinction). You can find my doctorate here and here and my most recent peer reviewed article here. My research blends arts and sciences and I am presently very involved in the digital humanities working on various databases and web systems allied to research in medieval studies. I am a research fellow at Clare Hall (University of Cambridge).

Dr Anthony Harris MA (Oxon) MA (Res) PhD (Cantab)
Research Fellow and Tutor, Clare Hall

My father was a scrap dealer who left school at 14, as did my older brother. I did not have the opportunity to take GCE ‘O’ levels but (against my parents’ wishes) I applied to do ‘A’ levels at the local grammar school – I was accepted after a special interview with the Headmaster. After leaving school, I was expected to get paid employment but went to art college instead. I gained a Diploma in Art & Design, this enabled me to access a specialist teacher training course some years later, at a time when there was a shortage of teachers and the GCE/GCSE qualifications were not required.

I taught in secondary and upper schools for about ten years and eventually found my academic niche after gaining a Master’s degree during a seconded year. After working in a University abroad, I studied for a PhD which, in addition to publishing some academic papers, enabled me to apply for a position at Cambridge which I took up in 1997, still without any ‘O’ level qualifications. After 3 promotions I became a professor of aesthetic development, now emeritus.

Professor Richard Hickman
Emeritus Professor of Aesthetic Development
Dean of Homerton College

I was born in 1948 in Rotherham, a steel (now ex-steel) town between Doncaster and Sheffield. You might know it from the Full Monty film. We lived a short distance away in National Coal Board housing in a development designed to serve two local collieries, Cadeby and Denaby Main, both opened in the second half of the 19th century. Before its pit opened, Denaby itself was a small agricultural hamlet. It was transformed into a filthy, densely populated, ugly but initially prosperous community of hastily built back to back housing with rudimentary sanitary facilities and the cheapest designs and building materials. By the 1970s, one pit was closed and the other soon to be. Capital had retreated but without cleaning up the mess left by an extractive industry that had for many decades been unconstrained. A reporter for the New Statesman described how ‘In the school playgrounds and on the streets an occasional face stands out, totally defeated beyond despair, a reminder that England has her Appalachia too’. When I was growing up the grime and drabness was alleviated by the passing prosperity of the industry and life revolved around the two pits. With hardly any other employment this is not surprising. Coal was king.

And so it was in my family. Both my grandfathers were coalminers. My father’s father, with his father’s help, escaped the pit in mid life by becoming the landlord of a local pub, The Eagle and Child in Conisbrough, the village onto which our housing estate had been grafted. My father, in turn, escaped by having tuberculosis, once in his teens and then again in his twenties. He survived but with reduced lung function. Plagued by asthma and periodic bronchitis, he too nonetheless worshipped at the alter of coal being a wages clerk at Cadeby, where he knew all the workers and kept tabs on the output figures. Coal was his favourite topic of conversation though he had very high brow tastes in classical music with Mahler and Bruckner his favourites. My mother’s father escaped the pit to serve in the army during WWI only to come home to go back down it. But he returned a strange man who could barely tolerate being inside a house let alone a coal seam and would wonder off for weeks at a time. My grandmother, whose other children were long grown up, fell pregnant with my mother. Though she tried to obtain some sort of pension from the Army, my grandfather was not considered pensionable and the result for her and her baby daughter was real deprivation. So my mother grew up in poverty, and this blighted her later life, when despite her relative prosperity she remained ever fearful that one wrong step by her children or her husband would land the family back in the straitened circumstances of her childhood.

Both my parents were clever people. In latter years my father took great pleasure in racing my little daughter’s calculator in adding up 3 digit numbers, and as I said he liked music and read widely. My mother was less intellectually open but she gave the family a real leg up. She had passed her 11+ and been to high school. Initially she worked as an unqualified class room assistant in a local school but stopped this when my sister and I came along. But then when I was about 18 months-old the government, desperately short of teachers, initiated a programme whereby people with some classroom experience could qualify as teachers in 1 or 2 years. She went off to Alsager Training College leaving my older sister and I with our father, who since he worked long hours shared responsibilities with our beloved grandmother who was still living in a back to back, outside toileted house in Denaby. Her streets were used in the mining scenes in the film Women in Love. My mother was a very good teacher. I know because she taught me at Morley Place Junior school both when I was 7 and again in the 11+ class (she moved through the school and caught me twice). Whether it was the early separation or the experience of seeing her as a teacher rather than a mother I do not know but our relationship was always a bit tense.

My mother taught the 11+ class at Morley Place for donkey’s years specializing in both being a gifted and imaginative teacher and getting miners’ kids to the grammar school in Mexborough. She taught us how to pass the 11+. The pass rate at least doubled under her reign of tables squares, mental arithmetic, hand is to glove as foot is to -----, and rules on apostrophes. But she also had us listen to the Firebird and produce related art, and memorably she read us Tom Sawyer (which everyone loved).

Not surprisingly, I passed my 11+ and went to Mexborough Grammar which turned into Mexborough comprehensive when I made it to the 6th form which I did a year early as George Shield, the headmaster, introduced a scheme in which some pupils could take GCSE’s early so they could then do the Oxbridge Entrance examinations. Otherwise these required an extra year in the 6th form a frivolity which almost all Mexborough parents (mine included) would not have tolerated.

At Mexborough, I was well taught the basics and more. There were some gifted teachers and I had many able class mates not all of whom made it to university. The sixth form was especially well taught. George Owen who taught me both parts of both the economics and history syllabi suggested I might apply to Cambridge. I remember him saying that he had not enjoyed it much but I might. I did apply. I did the entrance examinations for both Newnham and New Hall which had a separate exam based on a single 3- hour essay. I wrote on ‘What was wrong with your upbringing’. I was invited for interview and went to Etams to get a dress to wear. When I got down to Newnham everybody else was in ‘costumes’ as we called suits in those days. I had the New Hall interview first and it was very exciting. I went to a humanist meeting! I was offered a place and so not keen to go to the Newnham interview (the humanists had impressed me). George shield came to our house in Conanby to tell my parents (not me) that I had to go as they were probably going to offer me more than a place. I had no idea what more than a place might be but apparently there was money in it. So the dress was worn again and I went off for a second interview emboldened by knowing I was already going up Cambridge (seemed like down to me) in 1967. I ended up going to Newnham as a Clothworkers’ Scholar. The stipend was useful and I also enjoyed a National Coal Board Scholarship of which my dad was enormously proud.

At Newnham I made some good friends and was taught by some people who have remained lifetime inspirations. I was also desperately unhappy at times and often socially completely out of my depth. I made up for this by having a big chip on my shoulder and becoming according to my peer economists ‘a communist’! (Not sure about this). I have had a very enjoyable career and a really good life, eventually doing a PhD in the US and teaching there for several years, returning to Cambridge to teach in the economics Faculty for 18 years and then moving to Oxford to teach for over 20. I have a great deal for which to be grateful to both my college and the university. But the hidden injuries of class have certainly cut deep and left scars. Class is neglected in this era of multiple identities or downplayed given its perhaps minor role relative to race remains divisive. Even after crossing its barbed wire and sitting comfortably ensconced on the other side, it can suddenly flare up to feed imposter syndrome or enlarge the chips that still bend one’s back. Talking about it does help.

Jane Humphries, FRHS, FAcSS, FBA, CBE
President, Economic History Association
Fellow of the Cliometrics Society
Centennial Professor, London School of Economics
Emeritus Professor of Economic History, Oxford University

My mother left school at 15 from a secondary modern with a typing qualification. She spent her career as a medical secretary, at first in Royal Air Force hospitals and then in a rural GP practice. My father left school at 17, I believe, with some O levels and entered into laboratory work, becoming a laboratory technician in RAF hospitals and then in a veterinary practice. I attended a rural comprehensive school and applied twice for admission to Cambridge University. The second, successful application resulted in my admission to Churchill College in 1988 to study Modern and Medieval Languages (French/German). I graduated in 1992, took a Master’s degree in French and pursued graduate research at the University of Warwick before returning to Cambridge to teach in 1996.

Professor Ian James
Professor of Modern French Philosophy and Literature

I was born and raised in Harlow, by working class parents who believed passionately in the importance of education, though they didn't get to have much experience of it themselves. My mother didn't finish school as she had to stay home to support my grandmother looking after 7 younger siblings, and my parents married at 16 and had three children of their own by the age of 21. I'm the youngest (the fourth child who was born as the others were leaving home) and my mother in particular was keen that I should have opportunities that weren't as freely available for her or my older sisters.

After completing my GCSEs at Mark Hall Comprehensive school in Harlow, I won a fully funded scholarship to study my A-levels at Charterhouse. As might be expected, finding myself at a top independent (boarding) school was a bit of a culture shock! But the opportunities there were fantastic, as was support for applying to Oxbridge. I matriculated at Newnham College in 2001, reading Natural Sciences, and became one of those people who come up to Cambridge and never leave. I completed my PhD in Behavioural Neuroscience at Newnham before moving to Downing College as a Research Fellow in 2007. I held a fixed term lectureship, then University Lectureships and Senior Lectureships, before I was promoted to Professor in 2022.

Professor Amy L Milton
Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge
Ferreras-Willetts Fellow in Neuroscience and Praelector, Downing College, Cambridge

I was born into a working class family of immigrants, who lived in a flat on a council estate in Tower Hamlets, London.  Both my parents had left school at 16 with a handful of CSEs between them. My mother was a housewife initially. In latter years she worked in the post office sweetshop and then as a child-minder. My father worked in the Ford motor plant in Dagenham until he was made redundant; he subsequently moved to London Underground. To make ends meet, both parents would work in the evenings too by sewing garments for a local business. Growing up in 70s/80s east London wasn't entirely a pleasant experience, especially as a child of south Asian heritage. In retrospect, overt racism and bullying were rife at school (not to mention corporal punishment) but it wasn't something that registered much at the time. It was just seen as "normal" and you got on with it, learning to give back as good as you received. I take no pride in saying that I was involved in a number of "unsavoury activities", many of which I regret deeply. Eventually I got a clean break when we moved to Essex. I went to a comprehensive school in a deprived area where most students left once they had reached the end of compulsory education. However, I was extremely fortunate to continue to have the support of my parents and some excellent teachers who recognised my potential. They encouraged me and pushed me to do better, such that I managed to achieve excellent GCSE results. The rest, as they say, is history.

Dr Fraz Mir
Consultant Physician at Addenbrooke's Hospital
Clinical Director of Studies, Kings's College
Head of Postgraduate Medicine in the East of England

I was born in the East End of Glasgow (in the shadow of Celtic Park) in the early 1960s. It was a time of change in industrial Scotland with much of the old housing stock in Glasgow being demolished and families moved to “New Towns” in the so-called overspill policy. We moved to Irvine, on the West Coast about 30 miles from Glasgow. In contrast to other New Towns, Irvine was already a well-established community, encompassing one of the oldest continuously inhabited villages in Europe and an important port from medieval times. Accompanying the increased population, a variety of industries were established and my father, previously a shop worker in Glasgow, gained employment in a pipe making factory.

By the age of 11, my mother left in pursuit of a wealthier lifestyle and we were a single parent family. It was economically challenging to raise two boys on a working class wage. The education system in Scotland at the time was egalitarian, no 11+ entrance exams, no grammar schools, everyone went to one of the two local comprehensives - in my case Ravenspark Academy. Scottish secondary education covered a broad curriculum with science and humanities equally covered by all students. I enjoyed and was good at science and faired reasonably well in the other subjects but I also worked, delivering milk every morning from the age of 14, and was prone to bouts of truancy with my fellow milk boys.

While I obtained some good marks in my O Grade exams at 16, I left School and joined the world of work, initially as a shop worker then an apprentice engineer. I did not enjoy the regimented experience that was the apprenticeship and decided I had perhaps been a bit hasty in leaving school. A very supportive and encouraging conversation with the Headmaster of Ravenspark saw me readmitted to the school where I pursued Higher Grade exams in Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Maths, English and Modern Studies. At the time the Biology Department was staffed with three enthusiastic teachers who were very encouraging and supported my application to Glasgow University for admittance in 1981. Biology, Chemistry and Psychology were my 1st year subjects and I began to experience the effects of inspirational lecturers, primarily Dave Sherratt, head of the Genetics Department. I was set!

The four year degrees in Scotland allowed for more detailed study of topics in the final two years and I undertook the Molecular Biology degree, jointly delivered by the Departments of Genetics, Biochemistry, Cell Biology and Virology. It was a wonderful experience and cemented my passion for molecular genetics. I finished with the top 1st in the year. I was the first person in my entire extended family to go to University and it is important to realise that I could never done this without the government support that was available at the time - there were no fees and I was provided with an annual maintenance grant that more than covered my living expenses, leaving plenty to spend on beer and records (I squandered the rest). I stayed in Glasgow, in the Department of Genetics, where I undertook a PhD with a young lecturer, Kim Kaiser (who sadly died suddenly in 2005) which introduced me to the bleeding edge of molecular biology, and I worked trying to do genomics before PCR had been invented.

One of the people I met during my time in Glasgow was Mike Ashburner, a venerable Cambridge drosophila geneticist, and after my PhD in 1990 he invited me to join his lab. Michael’s support was monumental, particularly at the turn of the Century when genomics was exploding and I was given the opportunity to lead a multi-million grant application to establish Genomics infrastructure for the fly community - a lectureship in the Genetics Department followed and I have been here ever since, obtaining promotion to Professor of Genome Biology 10 years ago and taking on the role of Head of Department in 2021. Throughout my life and career I have benefited from incredible mentorship and support - from encouraging biology teachers through superb faculty in Glasgow to the many colleagues I have enjoyed working with in Cambridge.

Professor Steve Russell
Head of Cambridge Department of Genetics
Professor of Genome Biology

My mother had attended a secondary modern school, where all the students left without taking formal examinations. She worked as a shop assistant, although she stayed at home when she had young children. If there were playgroups and preschools in those days, they were not known to our family. My father’s education was severely disrupted by World War 2 (when many schools were closed) and although he completed secondary school after the war, this finished at age 14. His parents did send him to undertake a ‘commercial’ course, which allowed him to get a job as an office junior (doing various unskilled tasks). Later he worked for a manufacturing company before he was required to do two years National Service. Afterwards, he found a job where he was trained to repair adding machines, complex mechanical calculating machines that were essential to all businesses. He later took on two part-time jobs to supplement his wage, one as special constable, the other as a rental collector. My mother also got a part-time job working behind the bar in the local dog racing track two evenings a week. When we were old enough to be left, she returned to shop work. Money was always tight, but we were not poor - we always had enough food and serviceable clothes to wear. I was encouraged to do my best at school, but parental expectations were that I should behave and be polite rather than I should do well academically.

I attended state primary school in Harold Hill (N.E. London), but was selected to attend a local teacher training college one afternoon per week as part of a project to identify and encourage students thought to have academic potential. Perhaps this is why I started secondary school wanting to proceed to University. Whilst my parents were always supportive, they had no real notion of what a University was, what it might offer, or why I seemed determined to go to one. I was given books, and we regularly used the lending library, but we had limited access to high culture (I recall being taken to cinema twice, and the theatre once, as a child). We had a holiday each year, one week by the coast, but we never travelled abroad. School did provide access to Calais, symphony orchestras and one Shakespeare. My comprehensive school had a 10 form entry (300 students per year) of whom about 40 students each year stayed on to take A levels. Thus, whilst progression to university was still a minority activity, the school did support and facilitate this. I proceeded to read chemistry, and then prepare as a teacher of chemistry and physics, being appointed to a state school on an annual salary of £5996 - an amount that shocked my mum as she had not realised anyone could start work at such a high figure - more than my father had ever earned! She made a comment along the lines, ‘so that was what you told us about why people go to university’.

I certainly did not have a deprived childhood, as I had loving and supportive parents, and (unlike when they had been of school age) the state school system provided encouragement and a vision of the possibility of higher education. However, my family just did not have the cultural capital to know about, or encourage, going to university. Whilst working as a teacher, I completed a master’s degree and doctorate, and was appointed to Homerton to teach in the University’s Faculty of Education. Some of that achievement was due to my own determination and hard work, but I remain very aware of how the complete lack of familiarity with the notion of a university within the family could easily have led to me being persuaded to do what had been expected of me on leaving school - get a job and pay my way.

Professor Keith S. Taber
Emeritus Professor of Science Education

I grew up in Streatham, South London, attending the local state primary and secondary schools. My parents both held administrative office roles for most of their working life, but were also keen amateur musicians. The household did not own a car until my sister and I started attending university. Family holiday destinations, usually domestic, were reached via public transport, and only ever abroad to visit family in northern France. When I was 17 (and still in the Lower Sixth Form), my father died, leaving my mother a single parent with two teenage children. The reduction in household income that resulted meant that I was eligible for financial support at university. I gained a place to read Music, alongside an organ scholarship, at Selwyn College. Following a Master’s at Southampton, I spent a year in New Zealand, and immediately found myself missing academia. I was then accepted for a PhD in historical musicology at Magdalene College. Subsequently, I was appointed Director of Music at Homerton College, initially one day per week, focusing on extra-curricular music and the Charter Choir and, as the years went by, gradually taking on more responsibilities on the academic side.

Dr Daniel Trocmé-Latter
Associate Professor in Music, Director of Music, Director of Studies in Music, Homerton College
Affiliated Lecturer in Music and History Faculties.

I was born in a mining village, Kiveton Park, in South Yorkshire (then in the West Riding) and lived there for the first 18 years of my life. My dad was a miner and a colliery deputy. My mum had done financial office work to which she returned when I went to secondary school. School was the village primary, then the brand-new comprehensive school in Dinnington, about 4 miles away. I was the clever kid in primary school, good at reading and by the time I left a regular user of the village library mainly for sci fi. My schoolfriends and I were of that post-war generation who had everything; the NHS, school dentists whose first thought wasn’t to measure you up for dentures, regular trains and buses. Schools were well funded and well run; the West Riding helped define progressive education and it was as far as could be from the experience that young Billy Caspar has in Kes, or at least for a high-flier like me.

I got into Cambridge. That was something. Not quite the achievement the local paper claimed who said I had done so a year early! Which I suppose was true if, as had been the case before, most student had applied post A level, taking a scholarship term to do an exam before going off around the world for a gap year. Plenty of students, by 1970, got in, as I did, on an Entrance exam before A level and then got offers of 2 Es at A level - as I did. So, what was it like as a working-class lad entering the citadel of privilege? I doubt there were many students from a background as working class as mine, but I can’t say that felt like much of an issue. For a start we had come in at the tail end of student demos and left-wing activism, and I had all the credentials. I’d arrived with ideas of student power building a new socialist Utopia. I had my moments of ‘chippiness’ but was in general far too arrogant to worry too much about a social stigma.

I stayed on. I did a Sussex MA and then started a PhD back in Cambridge that never got completed. I needed to teach for the money and found that I loved it. For many years I supervised English for every college in Cambridge. If asked, what’s your field of study? I would say, what do you need, I can do that.

Homerton, being then a teacher training college, offered strange things such as contracts. Soon it became my biggest employer and I started to do other things for the college such as admissions. When Homerton became a full college of the University of Cambridge I was given my first full time job since 1974 (an unlikely post as cereal seed analyst) and became in 2001 a Foundation Fellow, a college lecturer in English, and Admissions Tutor, until a partial retirement in 2019. Unsurprisingly, ‘access’ was my prime concern as Admissions Tutor, and even now there aren’t that many students from working class backgrounds who make it to Cambridge despite significant changes in policy and practice.

Mr Steve Watts
Emeritus Fellow, Former Admissions Tutor, Homerton College

I grew up on a council estate in Sheffield, having moved there when I was three. Before that, my parents rented a classic 2-up/2-down house with an outside toilet and a tin bath, of which my only memories are of hiding from the rag-and-bone man!  Both my parents were office workers. My Mum left school at 14 and my Dad failed to complete A levels for health reasons. My Dad was also unemployed for most of my early and mid-teens. I had a lot of free school meals and clothing vouchers.

I went to a failing comprehensive school in the 1980s, which definitely did not encourage people to go to University! It was famous for teacher strikes, pupil strikes, giving you detentions for being 'elitist', and Jarvis Cocker. It was infamous for the death of a pupil on the playground after a game of motorcycle chicken went tragically wrong. As a female, I was statistically more likely to leave school pregnant at 16 than to go to University. I did A levels at an FE college. There I got to meet people from a wider set of backgrounds, including some who had gone to University, retired from a good job, and were now doing A levels for fun. They encouraged me to go to University far more than my school ever did.

I did apply to Cambridge but was put off by realising everyone else who was waiting for interviews all knew each other from private school sports matches - particularly lacrosse. I was offered a place in the pool and declined thinking I'd not fit in, so went to do Law and French at Birmingham. I was convinced that I was failing in my first term but stuck it out and somehow began to realise that actually I was not that bad. Encouraged by my professors at Birmingham, I went on to do a Masters and doctorate at Oxford. I was lucky enough to not have to pay tuition fees, to have a maintenance grant that allowed you to live, if not party, and to get AHRC funding.

I stayed on as an academic in Oxford, before moving over to Cambridge in January 2018. I still feel like an imposter and, despite having had to change my accent, I'm never losing short vowels!'

Professor Alison Young
Sir David Williams Professor of Public Law
Legal advisor to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution