ÁñÁ«ÊÓƵ

You report a BBC finding that Oxbridge admission processes prefer autumn-born candidates (The week in higher education, 7 March). The next day, The Guardian published an article headed ¡°Summer-born children suffer educational inequality, study finds¡±. My wife - a teacher - used to examine this effect 25 years ago.

A quick Google Scholar search identifies a 1994 paper by Caroline Sharp, Dougal Hutchison and Chris Whetton in the Educational Research journal that states its aim as explaining ¡°the general finding that summer-born children perform less well than their autumn-born classmates¡±.

It continues: ¡°Autumn-born children tended to perform better than spring- born, and spring-born children, in turn, out-performed summer-borns. The effect was evident in both primary and secondary schooling and persisted into tertiary education, with a higher proportion of autumn-born students graduating from university.¡±

It appears that we have been unable to do anything about this persistent effect, other than to keep rediscovering it.

Keith Richards
Department of geography
University of Cambridge