Brampton Manor: From One Oxbridge Offer to 89

In January 2014, one student at a state school in east London received an offer from Oxford or Cambridge. It was a proud moment, but hardly headline news. Eight years later, students from the same school received 89 offers in a single admissions round.

The school is Brampton Manor Academy in East Ham, in the London Borough of Newham, which is often described as one of the poorest boroughs in the capital. Its story is not about a secret formula or a clever gimmick. By the school’s own account, it is about something far more ordinary and far more powerful: expecting a great deal of young people, and then giving them every practical reason to believe they can deliver it.

A sixth form with a clear purpose

Brampton Manor opened its sixth form in September 2012. From the start, it had a stated aim: to transform how many students from disadvantaged backgrounds went on to Oxford, Cambridge and the other leading Russell Group universities.

That kind of ambition is easy to write in a prospectus and much harder to achieve. In the first few years, the numbers were modest. One student received an Oxbridge offer in 2014. But the school kept going, and the results began to build. In 2018, 25 students received offers. In 2019, the figure was 41, a new record at the time, and the story was covered by the BBC and The Guardian.

The Guardian reported that two-thirds of that 2019 group would be the first in their family to go to university, and half had received free school meals. Nearly all were from ethnic minority backgrounds. One of them, interviewed by the BBC, had been in care since the age of 14 and had just received an offer to study law at Oxford.

Records that kept on breaking

The success did not stop there. In 2020, 51 students received offers, according to The Independent and the Evening Standard. Many were the first in their families to go to university. One student, whose family had moved to the UK from Ecuador and who spoke English as a second language, described her mum phoning relatives back home to share the news of her Cambridge offer.

In 2021, students held 55 offers. Then, in 2022, the figures published by the universities themselves showed 89 offers for students applying through Brampton Manor: 24 from Oxford and 65 from Cambridge. That year, 85 students went on to take up places. When The Telegraph analysed those figures, Brampton Manor came top of its Oxbridge league table, ahead of every other school in the country, state or private.

Since then, Brampton Manor has continued to send large groups to Oxford and Cambridge each year. The school says more than 350 of its students progressed to Oxbridge in the seven years up to 2024.

No gimmicks, just the basics done brilliantly

When reporters asked how the school does it, the answers were refreshingly down to earth.

“We have a very traditional approach with no gimmicks or shortcuts,” Sam Dobin, the director of sixth form, told the BBC in 2019. A year earlier, he had summed up the school’s culture in two rules: “You have to be ambitious and you have to work hard.”

The detail behind those rules is practical. The BBC reported that the school buys every student their own textbooks to encourage independent study. A study centre opens at 6am and stays open into the evening, always staffed, so students who have nowhere quiet to work at home still have somewhere to go. One student who won a place to study engineering at Cambridge in 2022 told reporters that he stayed in school until 6pm most days, because there was no space for him to work at home.

The school also takes the mystery out of the application process. Specialist preparation for admissions tests and interviews is built into sixth-form life, led by staff who are Oxbridge graduates themselves. For young people with no family experience of these universities, that kind of guidance turns an intimidating process into something they can plan and practise for.

Making success visible

One of the most striking details in the BBC’s 2019 report was about the corridors. At the entrance to the school, plaques listed the names of former students who had gone on to university, and photographs of students who had won Oxbridge places were displayed around the building. Students told the reporter that seeing those faces, people from their own school and their own community, was part of what motivated them.

It is a simple idea with a powerful message: people like you have done this, and so can you.

The executive principal, Dr Dayo Olukoshi, joined Brampton Manor in 2008 and was appointed OBE for services to education in 2015. In 2022 he said: “We passionately believe there is no limit to what our students can achieve with sufficient effort and determination.”

It is worth being clear that Brampton Manor’s sixth form is academically selective and heavily oversubscribed, so its results reflect a talented and highly motivated intake as well as excellent teaching. But that is not the heart of the story. Many of these young people arrived without family experience of higher education and left with places at some of the most competitive universities in the world. The school made those places feel reachable.

What we can take into our classroom

You do not need a sixth form or an Oxbridge programme to borrow the best of Brampton Manor’s approach. These ideas work from Reception upwards:

Make success visible. Display pupils’ achievements, and those of former pupils, where everyone can see them. Children are inspired by people who look and sound like them.
Remove practical barriers. Something as simple as a quiet space at lunchtime or after school, or a book pupils can take home and keep, can make a real difference for children who lack those things at home.
Demystify the next step. Whether it is moving to secondary school or applying to university, explain the process clearly, visit if you can, and let pupils practise in a low-stakes setting.
Keep expectations high and the message simple. “Be ambitious and work hard” is easy for children to remember and easy for adults to model.
Celebrate the firsts. Notice and celebrate the pupil who is the first in their family to try something, whether that is a reading award, an instrument or a university application.

A final thought

In 2014, one Brampton Manor student received an offer. Within a decade, hundreds had followed. Nothing about that rise happened by accident, but none of it relied on magic either. It came from staff who believed in their students, put the right support in place, and kept going year after year until the results matched the ambition. That belief, made visible and practical, is something every staff room can share.