Access all areas - the project helping disadvantaged children into top universities - Telegraph

This huge increase is thanks to a new scheme called the Access Project. Set up in 2008 by Alex Kelly, 27, ateacher at the school, who gave up his job last July to focus on the scheme full-time (he also has one full-time employee and two interns), it aims to get the school's disadvantaged students into Russell Group universities – the top 20 universities in the country.

The bulk of the project's work is centred on weekly meetings between students and a 100-strong army of volunteer mentors. Eighty students from years 10 to 13 – about 20 in each class of 30 – are currently receiving one-to-one tuition (available to anyone who wants it), and a further 40 students are taking part in the extra-curricular activities.

The students visit their mentors, who are all university graduates and are mainly in their mid-twenties, in their offices – which range from law and accountancy firms to Google, the Labour and Conservative parties and the Civil Service. Kelly says the ideal scenario is that the same tutor would stick with the pupil for four years, from year 10 when the students start their GCSEs to the end of year 13, when they finish their A-levels. This month 10 mentors will be going into their fourth year of weekly lessons.

The Access Project also puts on extra-curricular activities, such as debating and creative writing, which build up confidence and are all-important on personal statements; trips to visit universities; conducting practice interviews and a trip abroad ('Some of these children haven't been to the other side of London, never mind Europe, and it's important to expand their horizons,' Verity says). Once students apply for the scheme they must attend six weeks of extra-curricular classes – all in their own time – in order to show their commitment, before they get assigned a one-to-one tutor. Mentors are asked to give a minimum of six months; most stay longer.

This year 15 out of the 17 year 13 students who enrolled on the scheme got university places, including at seven Russell Group universities. The two who didn't make it will be retaking the year. These students have had only three years on the scheme and Kelly is even more hopeful for 2012's year 13 students who have been in the scheme since the start of their GCSEs.

Jesse, who joined the Access Project when he was 16, remembers his first tutoring session with Julie Ross, an associate consultant with Bain & Company, global management consulting firm, who was matched with Jesse because she had studied veterinary medicine at Cambridge. 'I started writing the answer to a question and she'd say, "Oh my God, Jesse, you haven't read the question yet!" If it said "explain" I would just describe,' he says, laughing at himself. 'When I took exams in the past I always knew the answer, but wondered why I didn't get the marks. In one session Julie caught on to what I was doing wrong and taught me how to answer the question properly.'

Jesse travelled to Ross's central London office a few doors down from the Ritz every Friday afternoon (lessons finish at 1.20pm on Friday afternoons for the whole school, so tutoring is all in the children's own time).

During the hour Jesse and Ross would go over exam technique as well as picking up on things mentioned in class that the teacher didn't have time to go into detail on, such as a lesson about diabetes or the eye's structure. 'Jesse is incredibly bright and had no problem learning the stuff on the syllabus,' Ross says. 'But he needed to stretch himself beyond what they learnt in class to stay motivated and interested.'

Jesse has always been extremely intelligent. He says he used to stare out of the windows, not doing any work, longing for break time, and then surprise teachers by answering correctly when they put him on the spot. His mother, with whom he lives in Islington, did not finish school. He doesn't remember his father, who left when he was four years old, but when he was 12 he overheard his mother telling a teacher that his father had done a PhD in plant pathology before he left to go back to Ghana.

After his GCSEs Jesse was diagnosed with gluten intolerance, an explanation for why he had been in constant pain – 'I spent two years clutching my stomach' – and why he felt like sleeping all day. 'I honestly thought I was just lazy.' He became fascinated by the chemical compositions of his medicines and decided to study chemistry at university. 'One of the antibiotics, Metronidazole, had a formula similar to what I encountered on my A-level course, but a complex structure of a nitrogen and oxygen-based ring,' he wrote on his personal statement.

The individual attention and exam drilling that Jesse received from Ross meant his grades shot up from good GCSE results – 11 A to C grades – to his exceptional A-level results which, along with the interview lessons from Verity, gave him the opportunity to study at Oxford.

'I wouldn't have even applied if Mr Kelly hadn't suggested it; it just wasn't somewhere I ever considered going to,' Jesse says. 'He got Mr Verity to do practice interviews with me and that helped me so much – everything that came out of his mouth was gold. After I got offered a place at Oxford my mum said to me, "You must be clever." She never thought I was clever before that. She doesn't know much about the grade system – an A doesn't mean much to her, but she knows Oxford is a good university.'

Ross says this is one of the attractions she sees in the Access Project. 'It gives that practical support that I was lucky enough to have at home, but not all children have. The project levels the playing field so that these kids can shine, and Jesse is a great example. I've just helped him fulfil his potential.'

Professor Jonathan Cross, the tutor for admissions at Christ Church, Oxford, who also runs the university's outreach and access programme, says that one of the big problems is encouraging able students such as Jesse to apply for Oxford. 'Schemes like this – we have a similar version where we match our students with sixth-formers from similar backgrounds – help show the sixth-former that Oxford can be for them and that they will fit in and enjoy it here.'

Jesse is lucky – Oxford has the highest level of financial support for the poorest students of any university. Fees are £3,375 per year (this will go up next year to £9,000), but these do not have to be paid back until graduates are earning more than £21,000.

Living costs at Oxford are estimated to be £7,300 per year but Jesse is eligible for a bursary from Oxford totalling £10,550 over the three years, a government grant of £2,906 per year for disadvantaged students and the £3,497 annual student loan, available to all students, which is also repayable after graduation.

Jesse's classmate, Yonca Nacakgedigi, a bubbly, skinny girl with curly hair and black-rimmed glasses, has perhaps benefited even more from the confidence-building one-on-one support than Jesse. The 19-year-old came to Britain with her mother and sister from Turkey in 2003.

None of them spoke English and it took Yonca the first two years of secondary school to learn it, during which time school was a fairly miserable place. 'No one spoke to me because I couldn't reply.' Her family, who are Kurdish, had moved countries several times and she had had a patchy education.

Struggling to hit the top grades, she asked Kelly for tutors in two of her A-level subjects, and seeing her exam results in business, Kelly decided to appoint her a third tutor. Her week looked like this: 'English was Mondays with Harriet Ssentongo; I'd meet Miranda Arnold for business on Wednesdays and then Kabir Garyali and Adela Read shared my economics tuition on Thursdays – I met them for about two hours because it was the subject I needed the most help with.'

There is no shortage of volunteers signing up to be mentors. 'So far I haven't had to turn any student down who wants to do more work, which is great,' Kelly says.

Although Access Project mentors are not trained teachers, their real-world experience seems to be a perfect complement to lessons learnt in class. 'Sometimes my economics teacher would say something I didn't understand and I asked him again and he'd say it in the same way. So I would email Kabir and Adela and they would explain it in a new way and send me articles.'

Yonca's mother did not understand the UCAS system – she learnt English only when her two daughters taught her – so Yonca depended on her mentors' knowledge of the university system. 'Harriet helped me pick the universities and gave me the confidence to go for the top ones – I had discounted the top 30 but she told me to go for it,' Yonca says. 'Then I'd take my laptop home and show my mum what we'd picked. My mum would say, 'Leeds, I like that name,' Yonca laughs. 'She's very proud of me.'

Yonca's first choice was Edinburgh, where she was accepted with her predicted grades of ABB – largely due to the strength of her personal statement, which Harriet Ssentongo, who works in economics, also helped with.

'I spoke about my experiences of how I had to keep moving countries when I was little because Kurdish people weren't accepted anywhere and how much I have come to love English literature,' Yonca says. She lists her favourite author as Oscar Wilde and her passion for the subject is apparent: 'There are no right or wrong answers, there's just real freedom to answer the question in whatever way you interpret it, and although I struggle, I don't let it bring me down, I just work harder.'

Sadly, despite all her hard work, she did not get the grades needed for Edinburgh. She was in tears on results day, after getting BBC, but after hours on the phone managed to secure a place at Queen Mary, University of London, where she will start next month. Like Jesse, Yonca's tuition fees will be £3,375 per year, also covered by a repayable loan. She is also eligible for a bursary from Queen Mary of £1,129, a government grant of £2,906 plus the government loan of £5,475 per year – slightly higher for studying and living in London.

She is sweetly grateful to all her mentors for getting her this far and has bought them all presents. 'At school I sometimes felt so stupid, but all of my tutors helped me think that I wasn't. I always spent hours on the questions they set me as homework because I thought if people are giving up their time to help me, I should give it back too.'

Alex Kelly is obviously hugely proud of his first Access Project graduates: he invited some of his students, including Jesse and Yonca, to his engagement party (his fiancée Coralie Colmez mentors three students). On A-level results day, dressed in a grey suit while other teachers dressed down in mufti, Kelly warmly congratulated those students who rushed up to tell him their good news, while issuing instructions to distraught teenagers who did not make the grade: he told them to get on the phone immediately to the admissions tutors; in some cases ringing up for them.

Kelly himself went to a comprehensive in Wiltshire where, as at Highbury Grove, few students went to top universities; he was the only person in his year to go to Oxford, where he studied English. 'The only reason I went to Oxford while everyone else in my class went to ex-polytechnics was because I knew my parents expected me to go to a good university,' he says. 'But for some reason my teachers didn't want us to apply for red-brick universities because they thought they were elitist and not right for us. So I went to university with the feeling that there was something wrong.'

After graduating he joined Teach First, a highly selective fast-track teaching programme that puts new teachers in inner-city schools. Kelly started at Highbury Grove in 2005, aged 21.

'My first year of teaching was a complete dis-aster because I couldn't handle a class of 30 disruptive students,' he admits. 'But in my second year I was given a really bright group of 12-year-olds and it was a ridiculous joy; they would get to my class early and I would stay up late in the night planning extra work for them. I realised they were the kind of kids that should go to a top university but their older brothers and sisters weren't applying to university, so there was something obviously going wrong between the age of 12 and 18.'

Kelly had the support of the head teacher, Truda White, who has turned the school around in the 11 years she has been there. Before she started, Jesse says, bullying and trouble-making was rife, but now discipline is strict and results are improving. Kelly took a six-month sabbatical to research the project, and after speaking to university admissions tutors he decided that he needed to tackle students before they started their GCSEs.

'A lot of teachers' work is focused on getting kids up to a C grade at GCSE, because that's how league tables work,' Kelly says. 'Schools are given government incentives to get a certain number of students above a C grade. But there's no incentive to help them get from a C to an A*, whereas at fee-paying schools students are pushed to go for those top marks and they are the oneswho get into the top universities.'

The story is the same across the country: fee-paying pupils are three times more likely than free school meals pupils to achieve 5 A*-C GCSEs, 22 times more likely to enter a highly selective university, and 55 times more likely to win a place at Oxbridge.

In April 2008, in consultation with White, he set up the Access Project. 'I wanted to instil in them what I got from my parents, an expectation to achieve, which is what I think they'd been lacking.'

The Access Project is not a revolutionary idea, there are variations in Britain – from IntoUniversity, which provides learning centres where young people can go for extra classes, to AimHigher, a Government programme that aimed to widen participation in higher education, but which fell foul of cuts and closed in July. Across the world there are other versions of the scheme, such as the New York-based Big Brothers Big Sisters, which has been going for more than 100 years. Kelly said he did not look at the other schemes before he set up the Access Project, it evolved organically. 'I knew my students needed the extra help and I thought, why not use my friends to help them?'

He recruited his first set of mentors from his university friends; they told their colleagues, and now Kelly's volunteers come from more than 20 companies and he has more people wanting to volunteer. At first the mentoring arrangement was very casual; now, four years on, the volunteers have to fill out a questionnaire, including stating where tutorials will be held, and complete a two-hour training session. The students also give weekly feedback on their mentors.

Despite signing up to see them for only an hour a week, the sense of responsibility the mentors feel towards their charges is clear. One mentor invites her student to her house for dinner and mothers him, because 'his mother can't cope'.

Alice Fishburn, who recently got married and started a new job, said that waiting for her mentee Luke's A-level exam results was more nerve-racking than the other two events. A third mentor has left something for his protégé in his will. Ssentongo says, 'I felt I was Yonca's friend as well as her academic tutor and I felt a great deal of responsibility to build up her confidence.'

From September the Access Project is expanding into two inner-city London schools – Central Foundation Boys' School and King Solomon Academy – both of which have about 40 per cent of students eligible for free school meals. A third school is in line to join the scheme next year.

Currently the project costs £700 per student per year to run, which includes Tube fares for the students to visit their mentors, textbooks and trips to visit universities. Schools have to put up 15 per cent of the funding to show their commitment and the rest is made up from grants, corporate sponsorship and public donations. Central Foundation Boys' School has been sponsored by the law firm Slaughter and May but the Access Project is still looking to secure funds for King Solomon Academy.

Richard Verity, who listed helping Jesse get into Oxford as one of his most rewarding achievements on his round robin Christmas letter to friends, thinks the Access Project is worth the time and money. 'What Alex does is ensure that there are expectations for these students to achieve and the one-to-one attention they get tells them that they are wonderful. The immediate results, as we have seen in their A-level grades, are incredible. But if you look at what he is doing on a wider social scale, especially after a summer of rioting, which has been blamed on social immobility and lack of opportunity, he is showing these children that there are real chances to succeed out there and that there are others in the community who will help them get there.'

theaccessproject.org.uk

via telegraph.co.uk