Truancy jumped by almost 10 per cent last year to its highest level, despite almost £1 billion in government spending since 1997 to tackle the problem.

At the same time, figures from the Higher Education Funding Council indicated that more than 71,000 first-year students would fail to graduate, wasting around £500 million a year.

The proportion of candidates from state schools rejected by top universities also rose, as admissions tutors increased recruitment from fee-paying schools. The decline in state school entry to 16 of the 19 universities in the Russell Group reversed the trend in admissions for the first time since Gordon Brown, in 2000, attacked the “old school tie” at Oxford over its rejection of Laura Spence, a Tyneside comprehensive student with five A-grade A levels.

Universities are spending more than £300 million of government funding this year on “widening participation” initiatives to encourage applications from state schools. The setbacks for two of the Government’s key objectives raise troubling questions for ministers about the massive levels of public spending on programmes to cut truancy and attract more state school students into higher education.

David Cameron, the Shadow Education Secretary, said: “These figures are dreadful. The Government has spent nearly £1 billion on tackling truancy and it is getting worse.”

Jacqui Smith, the School Standards Minister, announced a crackdown on the “stubborn minority” of 8,000 students at 146 schools who were responsible for a fifth of all truancy. Teachers will be required to identify the most persistent offenders and their parents will be threatened with jail if attendance does not improve.

Professor Michael Sterling, chairman of the Russell Group, said that there was no evidence of a “systematic approach to decrease state students” among admissions tutors.

“It may be just one of those things. The best students happened to fall in a different area this time,” he said.

Professor Sterling, the Vice-Chancellor of Birmingham University, suggested that a reluctance to admit extra students above the number for which the institutions received government funding may have contributed to the decline in state entrants.The rise in entrants from private schools was evidence that universities were choosing the most able, regardless of government pressure.

“We must not deviate from taking the best. It would be indefensible to take students who were not as good simply to make that ratio ever increasing,” he said.

Explore UK News

• Crime News

• Education News

• Health News

• Science News

• Scotland News

Times Recommends

• Ashes bid in chaos as big gamble fails
• Private schools secretly put up for sale
• Council tax debt-chasers on £600 an hour