The Schwartz report on university admissions is a welcome dose of common sense in an area of higher education policy and practice that has often been fraught with emotion and mired in politics.
The report's recommendation about post-qualification applications (PQAs) is particularly heartening.
At present, the vast majority of would-be university students do not have their A-level results when they apply. This means that a lot of decision-making by applicants, schools and universities has to be based on guesswork.
From the applicants' point of view, there is the question of how high they should aim when they choose the courses and the universities they want. Some will be from backgrounds that encourage lofty aspirations. Their parents may have been to university themselves and have a strong commitment to higher education. Their schools may have worked hard at boosting their confidence. Such applicants are likely to feel relatively optimistic about the grades they will achieve. They will be more inclined to try for a place on the course they really want at an institution where the competition for places is quite fierce.
Others may be just as bright but come from backgrounds that are less wholly 'tuned in' to higher education and less focused on reaching for the academic heights. Such applicants may feel less confident about the grades they will achieve. They may opt for safety rather than ambitiousness in their university applications, or even decide to avoid the competition altogether by leaving the world of education.
How much better if, as Professor Schwartz recommends, people applied to university after they had received their A-level results. That way, their opportunities would be less closely geared to the degree of self-belief with which they happened to be blessed at the tender age of 17 or 18. There is nothing like a clutch of good grades to prove to yourself that you are a winner.
But as things stand, applicants generally do not have this badge of achievement. Instead they are labelled with their schools' predictions of the grades they are likely to get. Research indicates that in about half of all cases, the guesses turn out to be wrong. That is not a reflection of any inadequacy on the part of the teachers who do the predicting, but it does highlight the unfairness of a system that relies on information that is just as likely to be wrong as right.
In the current system, universities also have to do too much guessing. They have to estimate how many applicants should receive so-called 'conditional offers'. If more people than anticipated achieve the A-level grades specified in the offers, the universities are likely to be oversubscribed. This can have all kinds of damaging effects, from overcrowding in laboratories to significant financial penalties.
There will be practical problems in moving to a PQA system, but I believe that everyone - including universities - should pull together to achieve it in the interests of fairness.
None of this should be taken to imply that A-level grades are the be all and end all. They are, of course, very important indicators of academic potential as well as achievement, but universities should not be overly obsessed with them and fail to consider applicants in the round.
This brings me to a second major plank of Professor Schwartz's report: the assessment of applicants. I believe he is right to argue that the context of an applicant's achievements is one of the factors that should be taken into account in determining whether he or she should be offered a place. (Other important factors include the applicant's personal statement and the reference from the school.)
What this means in practice is that a university should have access to information that will help it judge whether any allowance should be made for an individual's circumstances. A person with one A and two Bs at A-level might have achieved those grades despite attending a school (state or independent) with a relatively poor academic record and having significant caring responsibilities at home. An admissions tutor might decide to offer a place to that individual rather than another candidate with similar grades who attended a school (again, state or independent) with a distinguished academic record and who had not encountered any major obstacles to their success.
An admissions tutor who makes such a decision is not offering a place out of sympathy or as some kind of compensation for hardship. Nor does action of this kind have anything to do with 'dumbing down', 'social engineering' or favouring one group of applicants over another - none of which would be in universities' interests. This is about treating people fairly and spotting evidence of exceptional motivation and academic potential. Raw A-level grades are a good but imperfect indicator. They become more powerful when viewed in context so that the scale of a person's achievement is apparent.
These are contentious matters, especially now that a significant proportion of the UK population has a stake in higher education as students or parents. It is right that calm, well-informed debate should continue. Everyone agrees that fairness and transparency in university admissions are essential. I believe that the Schwartz report is a valuable step in the right direction.