froM the senior tutor

Lucinda Rumsey

Mansfield has had another year of very strong academic results. We were 14th in the Norrington table, our third good year in a row, with our highest ever Norrington score and 19 Firsts, including four in Maths and three in Theology. University prizes were awarded to ten Mansfield students, including two Gibbs prizes, awarded to Audrey Ho (History and Politics Schools) and Luke Rollason (English Mods). Katherine Danks was awarded the Johnson Matthey Prize for best overall performance in Materials Prelims. The College has 26 new Scholars and Exhibitioners, based on their recent year’s performance, and a quarter of all our current students are now Scholars or Exhibitioners.

We are very pleased to achieve these results over a period where our state-sector numbers have increased significantly. The College has had three years where admissions figures have averaged 77% state-sector offers (for home UK students) and this year our offers for 2014 were 80% state. Of our current home UK students, 53% are from non-selective state schools compared with the University figure of 37%. Mansfield has a good mix of overseas, independent-school and state-sector students, and we have brilliant students across a range of backgrounds. However, we watch the state-sector numbers carefully, both because we want to check the effectiveness of our access work, and because non-selective state-school students are the group that Oxford has for many years had little success recruiting.

As Jenny Medland notes in her Access report on pages 26-27, we spend a lot of time and money travelling to schools and colleges and staging events – despite having few resources to put into this. We are tremendously grateful to Donald McDonald for raising money for us through his True Blue project this year. Donald has been delivering inspirational talks for companies at team-building events and conferences, based around his Boat Race experiences, and he has generously donated the money raised from his speaking engagements to our access work.

Donald is one of a number of alumni who has helped us in this way. I was struck reading the list of awards and student prizes this year how many are named after alumni and friends of Mansfield. Some of these awards are of very long standing, but others have been established in recent years. Mason Lowance has celebrated three of our former English tutors (our current Emeritus Fellow, John Creaser, and two former Mansfield tutors, the late Malcolm Parkes and Stephen Wall), in the College English prizes. The Mansfield Association has kindly agreed to fund our annual Science Prize for three years from 2014. And we are celebrating the contribution of Mike Mahony, our former History Fellow, not only in the long-standing Mahony History prize but by establishing the College termly graduate seminar in his name. Sarah and Peter Harkness’s bursary and prize have been an important focus in our access work in Yorkshire and the North East.

Antoni Chawluk and Janet Dyson retired this year. Both have made a huge contribution to Mansfield. Antoni has been a very dedicated tutor, unfailingly interested in the progress and well-being of his students and supportive to his peers in PPE. Janet’s years as Tutor for Admissions established the access work from which we are now reaping the benefit, and she has a special place in our history as our first Maths Fellow and the nurturer of countless Firsts in Maths.