I was the first in my whole extended family, on both my father's and mother's sides, to go to university.  Although an only child, I had eight cousins.  None of the six older than me went to university - although one did meet a student who had come to study in her home town university and later married him. One of my two younger cousins did eventually go to university ten years after I did.  No one in my family could give me any advice about university or what I might do afterwards. I was most interested at school in History, but my father said that I should do Geography because if I did History the only possible career I could pursue was as a schoolteacher, whilst if I did Geography I could be a cartographer or a teacher.  My father was, at the time, working as a printer; my mother was a secretary.

How many young people today from my sort of background would have aimed for the university that I went to - Oxford?  When I arrived there I found others like myself - my best friend was a Tynesider from a council house whose father worked in a council office and whose mother had long-term helath problems. And we were not the only ones.  Oxford (and Cambridge) were arguably more socially inclusive then than now.

The key to my achieving a university place at all lies with a type of school that no longer exists.  We are used, now, to focusing on a simple binary divide between those who have attended state schools and those who have attended independent schools.  As any form of indicator of social background this is hugely misleading.  The Vice-Chancellor of one our two ancient English universities was telling me the other day how at his university there are students from low income backgrounds who attended independent schools with the support of bursaries offered by those schools - and who tended to be among the most gifted at such schools because they had succeeded in rigorous selection.

I attended a 'direct grant' school - as did my Tyneside friend and many others I met at university.  These were schools where a high proportion of pupils were funded by the local authority, with a minority of fee-payers. My school in innerl-west London had a 5-form entry, with all the scholarship boys in the top four streams and the fee-payers in the fifth and lowest.   One of the crucial characteristics of these schools was their wide geographical catchment.  Thus instead of recruiting entirely from a very limited range of local neighbourhoods, they draw from a very wide area - with many pupils making significant journeys to reach them.  Pupils at my school must have come from every borough of West London - and beyond into Surrey and possibly Buckinghamshire and Berkshire.  This gave them a wide social mix of pupils who had passed the 11-plus and the entrance test. Among my friends at school were the son of a police constable and the Chinese son of a small shopkeeper whose parents had arrived as refugees from Mao's China and whose mother still didn't speak English.  But there were also the son of the head-teacher of the secondary school that I would probably have gone to if I had not passed the exam for the direct grant school, and the son of a notable family of London estate agents.

The direct grant schools were a very significant agent of educational and social mobility (I choose the phrase deliberately in the wake of last week's government policy on this topic), providing a possible route into a very different world for those who attended them.  They were far from being educationally comprehensive - but they were socially comprehensive.  And they gave those from less privileged backgrounds the chance to be challenged to become something different.  They had ambition for us, even when our families didn't.

The direct grant system was abolished in the later 1970s, and I now find it strange that when I mention the name of my school most people assume that I was part of a fee-paying elite - since the school went independent and still retains that status. 

It seems to me that in current debates over the 'most able, least likely' groups and the attempts to widen participation in England's leading universities we are in some ways trying to put the clock back to the situation of the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s when the direct grant schols provided a mechanism for doing exactly what we are trying to do today.  But now we're not quite sure how to achieve the same ends, with the means currently at our disposal.  I have today signed the University's submission to the Office of Fair Access (OFFA) of our Access Commitment - without agreement on which we will not be allowed to charge fees above £6000.  There's a circularity there, since I benefited from widening participation measures, of a rather different sort, when I was a schoolboy.