Poor pupils with one B and two Cs at A-Level should be considered for places at Oxbridge to increase diversity in top institutions, the universities regulator has said.

The Office for Students (OfS) claimed so-called contextual offers give bright students from deprived areas a route into university, without risking a fall in academic standards.

It suggested England’s higher education sector needed to be “more ambitious” with how it handles applications from candidates with deprived backgrounds, similar to US and Scottish institutions.

Under the traditional admissions system, the focus on top A-Level grades risks shutting out students with great potential from disadvantaged backgrounds, the OfS suggested in a report.

Candidates from the most affluent neighbourhoods are nearly six times more likely to reach the top universities than their peers on the opposite end of the social scale, data from 2018 showed.

This comes despite a “significant growth” in the number of contextual offers over recent years, according to the OfS.