ovid-19 has blown the doors off the way we live. The virus has been responsible for exposing – and increasing – levels of inequality, and that’s undeniable, politically. Families crammed into rabbit-hutch dwellings suffered proportionally many times the number of infections of those with airy gardens. As the furlough scheme winds down, hundreds of thousands of people will discover there is no social safety net as they queue at food banks. But what the shocking exam-results algorithm fiasco laid bare was an officially approved system for cementing advantage and disadvantage according to birth and social background. The program exposed how those pupils in struggling state schools consigned to the bottom of leagues must stay there, while the advantages of those in top state or private schools are deliberately enhanced. Maimuna Hassan, a student of Somalian heritage with English as her third language, was predicted two A*s and an A, but lost her Cambridge engineering place after dropping grades. She believed this was because previous Ofsted reports had stated that her school “requires improvement”. Despite the government’s subsequent U-turn in favour of basing results on teacher-assessed grades, an underlying injustice remains: the segregation of children into good and bad schools in the first place. Just before lockdown, the Sutton Trust, the social mobility charity, published a report by Anna Vignoles, professor of education at Cambridge, and others, that found that the school a child attends makes a difference of between 10 and 20% between pupils’ academic results. That’s enough difference to change their lives as schools strive to counter the gravitational pull of a child’s background. No wonder parents strive hard to get their children into the best schools – and the study finds parents across the social spectrum, including those whose children are entitled to free school meals, make the same first choices based on schools’ academic results. But they are tripped up by the allocation system in which oversubscribed schools use criteria that often favour the wealthy. As everyone knows, “house prices reflect the quality of schools nearby”, as those with money move closer. “Academies and religious schools, which set their own admissions, are the most selective,” says James Turner, the Sutton Trust’s chief executive; they can create catchment areas to avoid poor estates. Even in deprived areas, he says, two nearby schools can be sharply segregated, with 60% in one school on free school meals and 2% in the other. A powerful motor of social class segregation is the extraordinary dominance of faith schools in this most secular country. A third of state schools are inexplicably run by the religious; numbers increased in the latest funding for six new faith schools, including a Catholic school in Peterborough allowed to admit 100% by faith. Liverpool, with a high proportion of Christian schools, faces complaints of exclusion from Muslim parents who find faith schools’ admissions criteria force their children to travel far across the city. According to the Liverpool Echo, the city council has taken steps to create a scrutiny panel that will look at “how rules on admissions could disadvantage children from ethnic and religious minorities”. Humanists UK, whose research along with the Sutton Trust shows how religion is deliberately used as a proxy for social segregation, is providing evidence to the panel. But the power to run a fair admissions policy was stripped from councils by Michael Gove when he was education secretary. The sharp-elbowed middle classes are blamed, but the fault is with admissions systems creating schools that people shun. A great majority of parents – 80% – say they want schools fairly balanced, but once one draws an unfair intake, it sinks another nearby, which loses good teachers and students who have the luxury of choosing between schools. When briefly, at the end of Labour’s era in power, councils could allocate school places by lottery, Brighton tried and it was a great success: parents were content as long as they knew every school’s mix would be even, but Gove banned lotteries so as to let academies and free schools fix their own admissions. Prof Vignoles’ paper recommends ways to equalise intakes, including lotteries or banding so that every school admits even ability numbers, or else giving priority to pupil-premium children. But religious schools, her report finds, are the most socially selective: everyone is familiar with parents on their knees to get a vicar’s letter, and then never seen in church thereafter. It’s time to take religion out of state education. And it’s high time to start curbing private education’s advantages: one clever idea is for Oxbridge and the best universities to take the top few children from every sixth form in the country, whether high- or low-achieving, so that private education loses its value for money. Every year in school widens the social gap between children, research by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows, and poverty is the cause: paying parents more equal wages would do most for social mobility. As this pandemic opens a can of injustices, few are harsher than the gigantic difference in lockdown teaching. Children in private schools kept close contact with teachers, lessons were taught, homework was marked: resources that were bought with three times more funding. Contrast that with a primary head in Southwark, south London, who told me she spent lockdown organising 200 food parcels a week for hungry families, and raising money for the laptops and wifi that Gavin Williamson never delivered: her pupils stood outside using mobiles to catch the school’s wifi to do their homework. Levelling up starts here, not at A-level. No, it really starts at birth, reinstating the lost Sure Start children’s centres supporting families. Funding-starved early years teaching yields many times the lifetime successes of later years. But at least the government has conceded, and allowed results to be based on teacher-assessed grades. This unlucky cohort has already suffered brutal school-funding cuts; lost music, drama and art teaching; seen their shabby buildings repaired using money from pupil premiums. There was no need to add further insult to their injury. • Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist