The Government was attacked yesterday over its attempts to push deprived teenagers into higher education when the Chancellor of Oxford University said that universities could not solve failures by secondary schools.

Lord Patten of Barnes, the former Conservative minister and Governor of Hong Kong, said that Oxford could not be expected to drop its standards to meet state school admission targets.

Government pressure reached a “high watermark in idiocy” when Gordon Brown criticised Oxford for not taking Laura Spence, a straight-A student who went instead to Harvard, he said.

Lord Patten was speaking as Oxford began a campaign to raise at least £1.25 billion to guarantee its future as a world-class university.

John Hood, the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, described it as the biggest fundraising campaign by a European university. The money will be used for student bursaries, to attract outstanding academics, to protect Oxford’s historic buildings and to create research centres. It has already raised £575 million, including a donation of £25 million from the Garfield Weston Foundation towards the development of the new Bodleian Library.

Another £25 million was received from Wafic Saïd, the controversial businessman who paid for the university’s Saïd Business School. Mr Saïd was named in court as an intermediary in the BAE Systems arms deals with Saudi Arabia. He endowed the university with £23 million in 1996 and his business links led to disputes in the Congregation, the dons’ parliament.

The university wanted to establish a “culture of giving”, Dr Hood said, where alumni would begin donating to their alma mater straight after graduation, as in America. If successful, this would give Oxford the spending power of the biggest US universities. Harvard’s £36 billion endowment dwarfs Oxford’s initial target.

Lord Patten said that recent governments had been “pretty tight-fisted” about higher education while introducing targets and being generous to schools. He said: “Universities need to be able to demonstrate more clearly that they can, without eschewing support from the State, stand on their own feet more effectively.”

There were serious problems in secondary education. “We can’t in higher education mend these problems by lowering our standards,” he said. “We have to maintain our standard and hope that we will get more young people with the right qualifications applying to Oxford. If you’ve only got a third or 40 per cent of young people staying on at school post16 in some areas, it’s very difficult for universities to broaden access. Poverty of aspiration is a real challenge.”

The Government wants 50 per cent of school-leavers to be entering higher education by 2010, a target that many believe it will struggle to achieve.

A number of Oxford alumni attended the launch, including Sir Roger Ban-nister, the first man to run a mile in less than four minutes, and Michael Palin, the television presenter.

Mr Hood also said that the university would invite teachers from state schools to open days designed to encourage more applications from pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds.

The move comes amid concerns that some bright pupils may be steered away from Oxford and Cambridge for fear that they may not fit in. It follows research showing that half of state school teachers would never, or only rarely, encourage their most able pupils to apply.

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