Opening Cambridge’s Doors: Why Outreach Visits Matter More Than We Think
- 20 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Over coffee yesterday, Molly Willett from the Cambridge Classics outreach team told me about a visit she’d just hosted: four Year 12 students from a London school, accompanied by their teacher – who happened to be a Cambridge Classics alumna who trained on the PGCE with me. They spent the day exploring the Faculty, having a mini-seminar with an academic, enjoying lunch and being taken through the Museum of Classical Archaeology on a guided tour. They even had time to see a little of the city centre.
What struck me wasn’t just the richness of the experience, but how typical it is. Molly explained that groups come from all kinds of schools and with all kinds of backgrounds in Classics. Some arrive as committed GCSE or A‑level classicists; others come with only a passing interest. The point is possibility rather than prior knowledge. These visits are designed to demystify university, to make Cambridge feel like a place students can imagine themselves applying to, and to strip away some of the anxiety and mythology that can cling to the admissions process.
Academics are keen to give talks. Colleges are happy to provide lunch if you want. The welcome is genuine.
Listening to her, I was taken back to my own first encounter with a university. I must have been ten or eleven when my school took us to the University of Warwick. At that time, it was still being built. Two memories have stayed with me for decades: a hovercraft gliding down a laboratory track, guided by technicians in white lab coats, and a strange brown‑green “meat of the future” called soya, spooned into us by students in plastic goggles. I developed a lifelong interest in monorail systems ever since (!) but I didn’t love the taste of this new foodstuff; nevertheless, the whole experience of the day opened a door in my imagination. As a working‑class child, it was the first time I realised that university was a world I might one day enter. I didn’t think I was going to be a scientist – in fact, I didn’t know what I was going to be. At that time I had recently embarrassed myself in not knowing what the difference between O levels and A levels were on the bus home with some older pupils from school. Maybe it was the soya that put me off from being a scientist? Despite that, university did seem somehow a little less of a mystery: it felt like it was just like “big school”.
I didn’t go to Warwick. I didn’t even come to Cambridge (that was much later and under different circumstances). It’s fair to say that I was frightened off from Oxford. Instead I went to London.
No matter. That’s the power of outreach. For some students, a single day in Cambridge - even if they never study Classics - can be transformative. It can shift what they believe is possible.
And in Classics specifically, the work being done by the Faculty and by Molly is outstanding.
If you’re a teacher and you’d like to bring a small or medium‑sized group to Cambridge -whether they study Classics or not - get in touch. Sometimes all a student needs to do is to step through the door.
For contacts for Cambridge, see https://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/prospective/schools.
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