Regular readers of this column may be aware that I had a somewhat chequered relationship with education.

It’s remarkable how some things stick with you and I can remember like it was yesterday my headmaster’s final comments written in my report book after taking my mock O-levels (GCSEs to you younger people): “Surely he will not be returning next year to continue this sad tale at A-level.”

He had a point. I’d spent most of my secondary school years avoiding work as best I could, including many, many days playing truant.

What was remarkable was I managed to pass four out of my seven O-levels and I did actually return to continue the ‘sad tale’.

There’s a bit of a footnote here. I should have taken eight O-levels but my school refused to pay for me to sit maths and expected me to stump up the fee myself. I really was hopeless at the subject and declined to pay so I never actually took the exam. Nevertheless, I started my A-levels with much hope and renewed vigour – which lasted about three or four months.

To be honest, I had alternative distractions at the time revolving around alcohol, girls and a desire to earn money. So I left and got a job in an a factory office. That was an education in itself. If I’d disliked school, I absolutely hated that job and vowed to get out as soon as I could.

I hatched a plan that bizarrely involved going back to school, of a sort. After years of avoiding education, I signed up for an O-level at night school at my local technical college…and really enjoyed it.

I passed and that key fifth exam was enough to get me a job as an apprentice journalist and onto a day release course.

The rest, as they say, is history.

If I have any regrets about the path I took, it’s maybe missing out on the whole university experience.

I would bump into old school friends who would regale me with tales of all-night parties, foreign girlfriends and three years of ‘freedom’ I never really got to enjoy. And I also had a nagging feeling that perhaps I had failed to fulfil my potential in not getting a degree.

Many, many years later, I finally scratched that itch and was back at ‘night school’, successfully completing a part-time degree.

Coming full circle and somewhat bizarrely, a couple of years later I again signed up at night school, this time to do maths GCSE, the very exam I had refused to take when I was 16. For the record, I passed.

I reflect on my bumpy and uneven education every year at A-level and GCSE exam results time. I am in awe of, and have boundless admiration for, those young people who managed to avoid the distractions of 21st century life, worked hard and got the kind of results I could only dreamed of.

This year, however, has been so very different. No A-level exams were actually sat because of the lockdown, with grades being awarded initially based on teachers’ assessments. But nearly 40 per cent of teachers’ recommended grades – 280,000 in total – were subsequently downgraded.

Then the proverbial hit the fan as it became increasingly obvious it was pupils from deprived areas whose grades were lowered by exam regulator Ofqual’s algorithm as opposed to pupils from independent schools who saw their overall grades rise.

According to theguardian.com, Ofqual’s data showed that 49 per cent of entries by students at private schools in England received an A grade or above, compared with 20 per cent awarded to students at state academies or comprehensives.

The problem appears to have stemmed from the quirk in Ofqual’s methods that resulted in higher grades for less popular subjects such as German or music and for schools that had much smaller average course entries and class sizes (think private schools).

And a school’s previous record was also taken into account by the algorithm. So if you were a high-achieving pupil at a struggling school with a poor history of exam success, you were much more likely to be downgraded.

The upshot is private schools increased the proportion of students being awarded top results by more than double that of state schools. So much for levelling-up.

Before the weekend, the results and the algorithm used to generate them were still being described as ‘robust’ by the government.

That was until the individual stories of manifestly unfair treatment of students from state schools and sixth form colleges went from a whisper to a roar.

I was on a road trip over the weekend and over two days of listening to a talk radio station, I heard nothing but story after story of personal disappointment – places at Oxford and Cambridge missed because the algorithm had stripped out two and three grade levels; students predicted to get a B being dropped down to a U (unclassified, essentially the fail grade you get when you don’t turn up for the exam).

The pressure on Education Secretary Gavin Williamson inevitably became intolerable and the sound on Monday was the screeching of yet another government U-turn as Ofqual and Williamson announced that teacher-predicted grades would be used this year after all.

Better late than never, I suppose, but still no consolation for those students who were denied a place at their first-choice university under the ‘old’ system but have now been told they still can’t go there now they have the right grades because all the places have been allocated.

And who’s to blame for this fiasco? Logic would say it’s the government. After all, it was warned about this very situation by the education select committee in July and also witnessed the very same thing happening in Scotland the week before.

But no, Williamson is laying the blame fairly and squarely at Ofqual’s doorstep. And who will be clearing up the mess

Looks like the government will be dodging that one as well as university admissions departments up and down the country have been left to sort it out.

We can live in hope that in the end, some element of fairness can be brought to this sorry debacle. While education has an inherent value, I know from personal experience that its real worth is the opportunities it provides, the choices it allows you to make.

And there is something distinctly rotten about a government and an algorithm that sought to remove those choices from those who need them most. But when a Cabinet is appointed solely on the basis of slavish devotion to a hard Brexit and nothing else, it’s hardly surprising they don’t have the competence to successfully run a country.