NO STUDENT will be offered a place at university before they know their A-level grades under a plan that effectively ends clearing and predicted places. Universities are also being given a green light to discriminate positively and encourage more ethnic minorities and working-class students.

The proposals, unveiled today, raise the prospect that state school pupils with the same grades as privately educated school-leavers would be given preferential treatment.The plan could also result in A-level exams being taken earlier or first-year university students starting term later.

Charles Clarke, the Education Secretary, has backed the system of post-qualification applications (PQA) and the recommendations outlined today by Steven Schwartz, Vice-Chancellor of Brunel University. Mr Clarke said he wanted to act “immediately” on the recommendation that students should apply to university after they get qualifications.

Currently the majority of students apply for places on the basis of predicted grades. However while those university offers are binding, more than half of predicted grades turn out to be inaccurate.

Earlier this year it emerged that up to 3,000 state school pupils, or one in ten university entrants, were losing out to fee-paying pupils with worse grades — either because they had been discouraged from applying to top universtites or under-estimated their results.

“It must be fairer and more transparent for students to know their final results before making important choices about where and what to study and this must also aid decision-making by universities,” Mr Clarke said.

One advantage of PQA is that students who achieve higher-than-predicted results will be able to change their choice of university.

Sir Alan Wilson, the director-general for higher education, will take charge of working out how to implement the new system.

Yesterday, John Dunford, General Secretary of the Secondary Heads Association, predicted that the new admissions system could be introduced as early as 2007. “As a headmaster I came across a lot of pupils who missed the boat because of binding offers and being forced to take places they had accepted in spite of doing far better than predicted,” he said.

Another key finding of the Government’s chief adviser on fair admissions, was that “equal examination grades do not necessarily represent equal potential”. Though Professor Schwartz was careful not to recommend an automatic bias towards state-educated pupils, he pointed out that of the 934,000 full-time undergraduates and 521,000 part-time students that there was “evidence of some discrimination against some minority ethnic applicants in pre-1992 universities and colleges.”

As a result he urged universities to take a “holistic view” and regard applicants in a wider context. However he also recommended that admissions tutors should always encourage diversity.

Citing the University of Michigan, which last year successfully defended its practice of positively discriminating in favour of admitting qualified black, Latino and native American students to create a racially diverse class, he said: “If a university has two students with similar marks, it is OK for them to choose in order to become a more diverse place as that has educational benefits.”

He added, “But they can’t do that by biasing the whole system and saying that everyone who comes from a state school should get five points more.” Professor Schwartz said that universities should ultimately favour those students who showed the best potential.

His suggestions were welcomed by Professor Melveena McKendrick, University of Cambridge Pro-Vice-Chancellor, and Dr Geoff Parks, Director of Admissions for the Cambridge Colleges.

"We agree that it is important to contextualise an applicant's achievements - we have been doing this for many years, for example through the Cambridge Special Access Scheme for students whose education may have been disrupted or disadvantaged in some way,” they said.

In a further recommendation to enable universities to ensure fairer admissions and discriminate between the legions of high-grade A level students, Professor Schwartz also backed a universal aptitude test.

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