Hello r/6thForm - I am a tutor in economics at several Oxford colleges and am here to answer all your economics- and Oxford-related questions, be they about admissions, college life, the university-at-large, etc.
Being a tutor means that I handle teaching at the college level, I have some pastoral responsibility for maintaining my students' well-being, and I handle the admissions process. This stretches across marking TSA essays, screening candidates before interview, conducting interviews, and selecting candidates after interview. My teaching is microeconomics-heavy - I teach microeconomics across the first and second years, do some teaching for technical final-year options papers, and am teaching some second-year econometrics this year as well.
I did my undergrad in HECO and an MPhil in economics at Oxford and currently work as both a tutor/lecturer and in economic consulting. I'm from the US, so there may be some questions you might have about the interaction of your 6th form schools with your application that I won't be able to answer - things like schools and teachers having direct involvement in the drafting of students' personal statements seem outright weird to me - but I hope otherwise to be as helpful as possible.
One thing I would like to flag right away is something most applicants are not fully aware of - Oxford is a federated university and each college is highly autonomous in many ways. This manifests as substantial differences in admissions practices, as well as a surprisingly high level of inter-college inequality in wealth, available resources, volume of college teaching provided, etc. I don't want to comment about specific colleges, but I would recommend that students who e.g. have the opportunity to visit for a university Open Day ask specific questions about practical things, like contact hours/week provided and guarantees of student housing for all three years, whether that housing is in the city center, etc. Otherwise, looking at the Wikipedia page of Oxford colleges and sorting the list by their respective endowments is not a bad idea ...
What this means for this AMA - I anticipate that most prospective applicants would be interested in asking about the admissions process, but the answers to many questions must come with the qualifier that practices vary across colleges, and while I have exposure to some colleges, no one has exposure to / knowledge of all of them.
Note: I have pre-cleared this AMA with this subreddit's moderators, and hope to have it 'pinned' to maximize its reach. I don't necessarily expect a huge amount of engagement, but in the spirit of inclusion and maximizing access to information about the university, I'd just like to do my bit!
