The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) said yesterday that it had also decided that information on the occupation and ethnicity of applicants’ parents should also be made available to admissions officers. Previously this had been held back until after places were offered.

Ucas said that the decision was specifically designed to “support the continuing efforts of universities and colleges to widen participation”. Bill Rammell, the Higher Education Minister, confirmed yesterday that the Government was backing the changes.

Critics said that the move smacked of social engineering and that it could be used to discriminate against middle-class students. The new questions, which will appear on Ucas forms from next year, will also ask students if they have ever been in local authority care.

Pat Langham, president of the Girls’ Schools Association, said that she had grave concerns over the changes. “Why collect this information at all? If they are going to use it to discriminate against those who they feel are privileged — ie, those whose parents went to university — then what would be the point in anyone ever trying to improve themselves?

“I was the first person in my family to go to university. My father was a policeman and my mother a dinner lady. But I’m a headmistress with a degree; were I to have children applying for university under these rules, would they be discriminated against because I have worked hard?”

Research shows that being the first member of a family to go to university is the hardest barrier to break. The former Labour leader Neil Kinnock proudly proclaimed in 1987 that he was “the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to get to university.”

Ms Langham also suggested that the new questions would encourage applicants to bend the truth. “If your parents were property developers, applicants could mark them down as a ‘builders’; if they were managing directors you could describe them as ‘clerks’. Who is going to establish the veracity of these forms?”

Jonathan Shepherd, generalsecretary of the Independent Schools Council, called the changes “nonsense”. He said: “What next? Are they going to go back two or three generations or start collecting people’s DNA?”

Oxford University said that it had no intention of using the information, adding that it would hold it back from college admissions officers until after offers had been made and acted upon. Mike Nicholson, director of admissions at Oxford, said: “We haven’t any evidence to suggest that this type of information has any valid relevance to the decisions we have to make. It would be far more useful to know whether a candidate predicted to get good grades goes to a school where few pupils expect to do well.”

But Drummond Bone, president of the vice-chancellors’ group Universities UK, said it would allow institutions to understand more about how the applicant got to where they are.

The Government has set aspirational targets for universities designed to get more students from state schools and working-class groups. Some funding is contingent on this. But ministers have been frustrated by lack of progress.Between 2002-03 and 2004-05 the proportion of entrants from state schools fell from 87.2 per cent to 86.7 per cent. Over the same period the proportion of students from lower social classes fell from 28.4 per cent to 28.2 per cent.

Although Ucas says that the new questions are optional, opponents believe that those who refused to answer may also be discriminated against. Boris Johnson, the Shadow Higher Education Minister, said that students should have a right to withhold the new information without fear of prejudice.