A Week in the Life of a Pembroke Undergraduate: Pem-Brooke London & Pembroke North Summer School 2013

Last week saw the sixth annual Pembroke summer school for sixth formers participating in our raising aspirations programmes. The group from BSix and five other schools in Hackney were this year joined by peers from South Cheshire College and five other schools in the Cheshire/Manchester regions.

Forty students came to experience a week in the life of a Pembroke student, including reading and essay preparation in tutorial groups, lectures and study time in the college and Bodleian libraries; alongside living, eating and socialising together. We have filmed one of their sessions from the first day, a dramatised lecture which took place at Oxford University’s Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies on day one of the week – see below.

This summer school week is the culmination of a year-long academic programme (called “Pem-Brooke” in Hackney and “Pembroke North” in the Cheshire and Manchester regions) which all the students have undertaken from their home schools, attending seminars on the Enlightenment and Romanticism over the course of Year 12, as well as taking part in a study skills school during the Easter vacation based at BSix in London.

All those who take part in the programme are committed students who have signed up to study above and beyond their A Level courses and to push themselves to achieve even more. The academic teaching is provided by a group from Pembroke headed up by our Access Fellow, Dr Peter Claus, who is supported by Fellows, postgraduates and many volunteer undergraduates.

Pembroke believes that it is important to make efforts to ensure that our world-class education is available to all those with the academic ability and potential to take full advantage of it. We recognise that there is much work to be done to make this a reality for all prospective students in the UK and beyond.

The aims of the “Pem-Brooke” and “Pembroke North” programmes are therefore to raise the aspirations of the students who take part (particularly those from disadvantaged and non-traditional University application backgrounds), to get them to think about and engage with subjects they may not have considered studying, and to raise their academic attainment by engaging them in sustained intellectually challenging programmes.

The 2011-12 cohort of the Hackney “Pem-Brooke” scheme included 23 students, of whom 9 subsequently applied to Oxbridge for an undergraduate place, 7 were interviewed and 5 received offers. Alongside this, there has been a 500% increase in the number of students at BSix (our partner “hub” school in Hackney) who applied to Russell Group Universities compared to five years ago, when the Pem-Brooke initiative was started there.

All photographs by Genesis Graphics. To see more click here.