Felix for Junior Access Officer
Pembroke is already one of the colleges in with the most involvement in access, as evidenced for high signups
for events such as the shadowing scheme, where we provide a tenth of the spaces in the University but I still
think both us and the University in general could do more.
I think the areas we should focus on can be split up as follows: giving students the confidence that they would
fit in here both socially and intellectually, explaining the actual implications of the rise in tuition fees and just
generally helping students understand the application procedure:
 Try to set up a Pembroke e-mentor scheme similar to the university-wide scheme run by CUSU, pairing
Caius students with talented applicants from our target areas who could benefit from extra guidance.
 Use the bus provided by CUSU to engage on a large scale access tour around our target areas such as
Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Leicestershire and Southwark in south London over the Easter term with a
couple of volunteers from within Pembroke and hopefully a fellow or two as the best way for access to
work is face to face
 At the moment due to misrepresentation in the media there is a lot of confusion about tuition fees that can only be detrimental to access. An Evening Standard
poll this summer showed that 44% of GCSE students believed you had to pay the fees up front and 20% believed it showed up on your credit rating. This is not
acceptable.
 We need to focus on working with CUSU, at the moment they simply aren’t holding up their end of the bargain when it comes to access
 Their information on finance at Cambridge hasn’t been updated since mid-2011 bar a link to the Times Higher Education guide summary of the increase
meaning they’ve already missed two application cycles.
 Their summary of weekly costs is even poorer, having not been updated since 2004. We all remember how cheap things were back when we started
secondary school, this information is no longer relevant and facets such as this need to be improved
 More explicit help for applications: if applicants are going to be at a disadvantage if they didn’t take Further Maths, three Sciences or a Foreign Language then
they need to be told, and at a young age so they can shape their decisions around this. This isn’t the application system of the 70s where the supervisor is
looking for generalists and if this isn’t stated then this will disproportionately benefit candidates from the most clued up schools
Effective access work is one of the easiest ways to address social inequality and as such I believe it is vitally important
Nominated by Matt Pullen (Vice President) Seconded by Nathan Cole (hostels)