Top universities have failed to attract more students from state schools and working-class backgrounds, despite spending millions on outreach schemes.

The percentage of students from state schools and working-class backgrounds fell at Oxford, Cambridge and Bristol, according to the latest performance figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA).

The figures also suggest that nearly a quarter of students (22.6 per cent) are likely to drop out before finishing their degree courses, a slight deterioration on the previous year.

In ten universities more than one third of degree students are expected to drop out. The figures will come as a disappointment to the Government, which has set a target of 50 per cent of young people attending university by 2010, and had spent hundreds of millions of pounds widening university access to the working classes and expanding the provision of degree courses.

Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, said: “I'm the first to admit we need to go further. Even though rate of progress is slow, the key to achieving further progress is going to be greater structural links between universities and state schools and colleges.” Getting more young people to complete university courses was a “social and economic imperative”.

“If we can't maximise the talent of the whole population the economy will lose out,” he said.

He admitted that dropout rates were not improving as hoped, but said that the UK still had one of the highest levels of student retention when compared internationally.

The latest figures, covering the 2006-07 academic year, show that the proportion of students at university who came from state schools edged up by less than half a percentage point from 87.9 to 88.3 per cent.

Over the same period, the proportion of first-year students from lower socioeconomic groups increased from 29.1 to 29.8 per cent.

The figures also show that some of the UK's top universities are a long way from achieving the official

“benchmarks” or aspirational targets. The proportion of students at Oxford from the lower socioeconomic groups fell below 10 per cent, from 11.4 per cent the previous year, leaving it far behind its official benchmark of 17.9 per cent. State schools provided 53 per cent of its students, down from 53.7 per cent the previous year.

At Cambridge, the proportion of state school students fell only slightly from 57.9 to 57.7, but the university was still far behind the official benchmark of 75.8 per cent.

Bristol University had a much bigger fall-off, from 65.1 to 63.1 per cent, although it is closer to achieving its benchmark of 75.7 per cent.

Geoff Parks, head of admissions at Cambridge, said it was devising a plan to invite state school teachers to spend time at the university to encourage more of them to persuade their pupils to apply.

The decline in the number of students at state schools studying modern languages had contributed in part to the decline, he added. The university had eased its entry requirements by dropping the need for a GCSE in a foreign language in an attempt to attract more children from state schools. It has also decided recently to abolish its separate application form, and the accompanying £10 fee, to widen access.

David Willetts, the Shadow Universities Minister, said that too few state school pupils were getting the right advice on what A levels they would need to get into elite universities.

Of the 740,000 A levels taken in England last year, 240,000 were on the list of “soft” subjects that are accepted by top universities, such as Cambridge and the London School of Economics, only if they are studied with traditional subjects, he said.

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