Hackney college creates its own dreaming spires

 
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Anna Davis @_annadavis12 March 2012

A Hackney college has built a replica of an Oxford don’s room to help students feel more at home among the dreaming spires of top universities.

A-level students at Brooke House Sixth Form College now have tutorials in a room lined with leather-bound books, antique rugs and a view over a garden filled with replica classical sculptures to prepare them for life at Oxbridge.

Ken Warman, principal of the college, known as BSix, trawled auction rooms in Islington and spent £6,000 creating the room, which used to be a sparsely furnished staff room with no ceiling.

He said: “The building is 10 years old, but it actually looks 200 years old. Most of our students have always been taught in modern buildings. This is like a decompression chamber for them.

“For anyone, walking into unfamiliar surroundings can throw you. If you go to Oxford it is a daunting experience. But if they have already done it they will be much more able to cope.”

The new room is part of a project BSix is running with Pembroke College, Oxford, to encourage more students from disadvantaged backgrounds to apply to the top tier of universities.

Peter Claus, a senior research fellow in history at Pembroke, spends three days a week in his replica room at BSix teaching students who are applying for elite universities.

Students are interviewed for a place on the programme and spend a year having seminars with Dr Claus, taking part in Easter and summer schools and visiting Oxford.

Dr Claus said: “I think the situation with social mobility and the possibility of the most talented of our young people to get to the very top and to do their best is urgent, especially in the current economic crisis.

“I have a view of the academic or intellectual in society as having a public duty.”

Mr Warman said: “The idea is to encourage people to set their sights high. To get into the room students must walk through a garden filled with statues of Julius Caesar and past a replica of the Parthenon frieze.

“When students walk in they do go ‘wow’. It is very different.

“The experience of sitting in a room with a tutor on your own, reading your essay out is something the students won’t have experienced.”

Latest figures show 319 students from BSix went to university last year, and 75 per cent of them were the first in their family to do so.

Just one student went to Cambridge, and 10 went to Russell Group universities. The college aims to increase these figures.

About 70 per cent of students at BSix were eligible for the Education Maintenance Allowance, which was given to the poorest pupils to help them stay in education past the age of 16.

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