After A-level results this year, the papers struggled to provide their usual commentary on grade inflation after a slight fall in numbers of As and A*s this year. We still got the obligatory photos of successful students jumping up and down. But is there another story we should be looking at and maybe more challenging?

Les Ebden, head of OFFa certainly thinks so.

In a piece in the  papers, he talked about how poorer students risk losing out to middle-class bias.

As a University which recruits from a wide range of students (possibly wider than some Russell Group institutions), is there more that we could be doing to help our students succeed?

We know from analysis of league table and DLHE data that the best way of getting students into good graduate level employment is for them to gain 1sts or 2(i)s, and this discussion on how we could improve student outcomes is now happening. It’ll also have a positive bias on league table position – and therefore create  a virtuous circle where we might recruit students more capable of gaining better degrees.

But as well as degree classification, in order to compete with the graduates from other universities, we might also want to look at the amounts of social and cultural capital our students have. This might be the capital that they come to university with, or it might be that which they develop when they are here. Are we sure that a student going trough one of our programmes is developing these aspects of themselves as well as developing their subject expertise?

Our graduate attributes programme – Staffordshire Graduate – might go some way to improving this, but I wonder if there is more that we could be doing to improve the chances of success of our students.

At a recent validation at a military partner of the University, I heard about a really interesting programme for those who are about to go to Sandhurst, but who the army feels are likely to struggle. As well as the inevitable drill, PT and camping (i’m not proposing these yet), there was an emphasis in the course on students doing presentations on leadership, Britain and Society and Art Science and Culture. All of these were designed to make a more rounded individual, and were to address issues of lack of cultural capital.

The topics for presentations were various, such as:

• “‘Pornography is a greater threat to gender equality than the burkha’ – discuss”,
• “Who was more to blame for the credit-crunch: greedy bankers or greedy consumers?”
• “Can a coalition government be a success?”
•  “Multiculturalism – Success or Failure?”
• “To what extent is the public responsible for creating an immoral press?”
• “Has the UK surrendered too much sovereignty to the EU?”
• “Alcohol or obesity – which is the greater threat to the UK’s health?”
• ‘Over-priced and under-achieving’ – Is this a fair assessment of the Large Hadron Collider?
• Can we overcome our dependence on fossil fuels?
• To what extent do computer games incite violent behaviour?
• Young British Artists: “Talented or Tasteless?”
• What will be the social impact of the Human Genome Project?
• To what extent is Britain’s “Special Relationship” with the US beneficial to the UK?
• To what extent do the modern media shape world conflict?

This left me with a number of questions:

1. Do our students leave here with the “right” social and cultural capital?

2. Would it be possible to build this into a modular award structure?

3. Would students understand the benefit of material that is not subject based?

4. Who decides what is appropriate socially and culturally?

5. Would any work on this be based against groups (eg BME) who may have a different view of appropriate social and cultural capital

6. Is this the responsibility of a University?

Ultimately, if we want out students to succeed in competing for the same jobs and internships as others, we need to start leveling the playing fields – and ask how can we start to share this difficult to define range of cultural and social capital with our students in an explicit way to raise their aspirations and outcomes.