This year, a record 25 Milestone students have received offers from Cambridge and Oxford; 16 of them secured a place at Cambridge, while 9 were accepted at Oxford. This is up from 11 Cambridge offers and one Oxford offer in 2014. In parallel, our success rate at the two leading British universities (the percentage of students applying who received an offer) also improved.
At Cambridge, 42.1% Milestone students were accepted this year, up from 30.5% last year, while the corresponding increase at Oxford was from 25% to 60%. Our combined acceptance rate at both universities this year was 47.1%, up from 29.2% in 2014.
In total, 117 Milestone students applied to UK universities this year; in other words, the 25 offers represent 21.4% of our students in the 2014/2015 Senior year. To put this figure into context, the top 20 British secondary schools (including St Pauls, Westminster and Eton) sent between 20.5% and 45.7% of their students to Oxford and Cambridge in the three years leading up to 2011. These are the latest available data from The Sutton Trust, a British educational charity committed to social mobility and widening access to higher education. As these figures don’t cover the same time period, they are, of course, only indicative, but if Milestone were one of the 3,167 UK secondary schools covered by The Sutton Trust statistics, we would come in 18th place in terms of Oxbridge offers.
This success also reflects our emphasis on quality teaching and our efforts to make our programmes ever more academic, across all four years. We congratulate the offer holders, and keep our fingers crossed that they will all fulfill the conditions of their offers!