Ashbourne College congratulates students on their Oxbridge Offers

Ashbourne College is delighted to announce that five of our students have just
received conditional offers from Oxbridge. Four of these offers are from
Cambridge, which remains one of our students’ most popular university
destinations, while another student has been accepted by Oxford to read for the
Classics II degree course. The Cambridge courses include Economics, Land
Economy and History of Art, for which two of our students have been accepted.
In recent years we have had students going on to take Oxbridge degrees in a
range of other subjects, including Architecture, English, Mathematics and
Engineering, indicating the breadth of Ashbourne’s academic success.

The applicants from Ashbourne who have received offers this year participated
in the Ashbourne Oxbridge Programme (AOP). The AOP is a year-long
programme beginning in the first weeks of the Spring Term of Year 12 and
completing with the final decisions made by the two universities in January the
following year. In this way, a long and often grueling commitment is made by
these students in order to achieve an offer from two of the best universities in
the world.

A successful Oxbridge application comprises a number of different elements. All
of these students have displayed the highest academic ability, both in their
existing qualifications and in their performance in pre-interview assessment
tests. They have also shown great personal and intellectual enterprise, which
they have sustained since the beginning of Year 12. Independent research
beyond their A-level curriculum has played a significant part in their success.
This has ranged from the 5000-word Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) to the
attendance of specialist courses and relevant work experience, often taking up
significant periods in their vacations.

With applicant-to-offer ratios of 10:1 in some Oxbridge degree courses,
successful students have demonstrated their suitability in numerous different
ways, developing an outstanding profile of academic depth, intellectual breadth
and personal commitment worthy of the highest levels of competition on the
global stage. Needless to say, their successful Oxbridge applications will give
them many advantages through their education at one of the global ‘top ten’
universities but they had already created the momentum of that success in their
commitment to personal, academic, and intellectual excellence during their time
at Ashbourne.

The ‘journey of a 1000 miles’ that leads to a successful Oxbridge application is
made up of many small steps of the highest quality at every stage of the way. It is
a testament to the personal attributes of these students, as much as to their
academic and intellectual abilities, that they have reached their Oxbridge goals.