Despite their elite and wealthy image, Oxford City experiences high levels of educational inequality. In particular, children from disadvantaged backgrounds struggle to achieve good results throughout primary school and at GCSE exams. Such educational disadvantage earlier in life lowers future job prospects, and reduces the number of young people able to consider further and higher education.

Through Schools Plus, university students provide capacity to classrooms by offering one-to-one support to pupils. The project produces positive results. For example, through Oxford's Reading Plus project a literacy inspector reported that the additional support helped the class to increase literacy rates by 10%. In Maths Plus, 12 students on the GCSE C/D grade borderline were supported and at the end of the academic year all achieved a C or above, with two getting Bs and one an A.