LABOUR MP David Lammy has accused Oxford and Cambridge universities of “social apartheid” after giving offers to only a handful of black students.

Just three of Oxford’s 32 colleges have made an offer to a black A-level applicant every year between 2010 and 2015, Mr Lammy revealed.

He accused the universities of “systematic bias,” saying that “many Oxbridge colleges are still fiefdoms of entrenched privilege, the last bastions of the old school tie.”

A quarter of colleges at Cambridge did not offer any places to black British applicants on average for each of the six years.

Yet every year, there are nearly 400 black students gaining three As or better at A-level.

Half of Cambridge’s 29 colleges did not make a single offer to Pakistani applicants in 2015.

Runnymede Trust director Dr Omar Khan said part of the problem was that those with parents or grandparents with university educations know how to navigate the system.

Dr Khan also called for universities to listen to the experiences of their students from black and ethnic minority backgrounds as to whether they feel that they fit into each institution, pointing out that “bad experiences will feed back to communities.”

A regional bias was also revealed in the data obtained by Mr Lammy. Nearly half of offers to Oxbridge colleges went to applicants from the south-east, compared to 15 per cent from the north, 11 per cent from the Midlands and 3 per cent from Wales. 

The Labour MP said the admissions process needs to be reformed because universities are “failing to live up to their responsibilities.”

An Oxford University spokesman said limply that its failure was society’s problem, with the path to change “a long journey that requires huge, joined-up effort across society to address serious inequalities.”

The University of Cambridge claimed its admissions decisions were based solely on academic considerations.

Shadow education secretary Angela Rayner said: “The proportion of comprehensive-school pupils getting in to top universities under the Tories is lower than when Labour left office.”

She said Labour’s plans to provide free lifelong education and restore maintenance grants for the most disadvantaged students would widen access to top-flight universities.