There’s a line in Edwina Currie’s Diaries, volume two; it’s August 1992 and her luckless daughter has just flunked her A-levels. “Denstone,” Currie writes of the Staffordshire independent school, “has a lot to answer for.” It stuck in my mind at the time because it was rare, then, to hear that viewpoint so baldly expressed, that when you pay for a private school, you’re buying grades, and if those grades don’t materialise, the school has ripped you off. In 2021, parents investing in private education can feel pretty satisfied with their return: 70% of independently educated pupils got As or A*s, set against 42% at state academies and 39% at comprehensives. In the scramble to explain why affluent kids should outperform their peers to such a degree, I’ve heard the following hypotheses: they work harder; their teachers are better; poorer students didn’t have laptops or quiet spaces to work in the pandemic; there was less face-to-face online teaching in state schools. But just logically, leaving all my own prejudices and personal experience of private education aside, when grade inflation is running at 9% in private schools and 6% elsewhere, isn’t the explanation much simpler? Private school teachers, even though they are magic, apparently, are still human: faced with a choice between inflating the odd grade and 1,000 Edwina Curries chewing their ear off, they did what any of us would have done. According to the Sutton Trust, 23% of teachers at private schools reported pressure from parents about their children’s grades, set against 11% of teachers in less-affluent state schools). It’s just another day in our inverted politics, where what the government says is the exact opposite of what it does. Ministers say they want to “level up”, then stand back and watch as those that already have are given more, and those that have the least are most disappointed. They claim to be on the side of disadvantaged pupils, and then last year literally invented an algorithm with a baked-in bias against schools in poorer areas. They say they will move heaven and earth to make up for lost learning, but can’t find the money to take the advice that they commissioned. Perfectly foreseeable challenges emerge, and there isn’t the ghost of a plan to meet them. The comfortable analysis is that the education secretary just isn’t up to the job. Certainly, Gavin Williamson appears chaotic and evasive. If rumours surrounding the forthcoming reshuffle are true, Williamson has achieved the impossible, and managed to unite parents, teachers and the cabinet, if only on one view: that he is totally useless. The much less comfortable conclusion, though, is that underneath what looks like mishaps is a formula of strategic insincerity. There is no natural brake on the government’s rhetoric, as it has no intention of fulfilling any of it. Ministers will continue to bandy about their synonyms and neologisms for “equality”, while charting a course that deepens inequality at an alarming rate, and the insult to our collective intelligence is the least of our problems, however keenly we feel it. For A-level students themselves, the immediate concern will be university admissions. Overstretched anyway, with a record number of applications, universities said before the results that there would be very little flexibility for students who missed their grades. Competition in clearing is expected to be intense, yet young people have been advised not to defer, since next year will be just as brutal. In the scrum for places on prestigious courses, which academics fear will favour privately educated pupils, prospective students may be distracted from the underlying reality laid bare by the pandemic. Universities are so heavily reliant on students as cash cows that there is no longer any headroom to worry about their experience of learning. Students had to be on site in 2020, even with no in-person teaching, let alone any socialising, for the extraction of their rents. There was much debate at the time over what this had done to Covid rates, but very little on how it felt at the level of the individual citizen, to be shunted around the country, like numbers in an accounting column. Educationists are right to worry about the lost learning of the generation coming of age in the pandemic; politicians should be much more worried about this group coming of age as voters. They have been treated as not-quite-legitimate for long enough; not quite important enough to deserve detailed planning and substantial investment. A very small number of parents – 6% – have been able to make up the shortfall with school fees, but that still leaves a large army whose grievances cannot be minimised and ignored for ever. Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist