THE annual media storm over exam results always provides a window into the class realities in British education.

This year A-level results show a growing gap between the richest and poorest youth, with regional differences in attainment and grade gap widening between independent and state schools.

To the annual campaign to suggest that the curriculum is not rigorous enough, exams are too easy, that schools are failing and teachers are inadequate, is now added the news that the proportion of students gaining A and A* grades is 27.2 per cent down from the highest score of 44.8 per cent, which was achieved during Covid.

The Covid-era figures represented the expectation of the people who knew best the aptitudes and achievements, the potential, of their students.

The rational response would be to examine what factors intruded. And sitting there on the surface is an insight into the regional variation in results which show the best results in south-east England with the main working-class areas, the north-east, the Midlands, etc achieving lower results.

So we can conclude that teachers, by and large, have higher expectations of their working-class students than the system delivers.

Meanwhile, the rhetoric coming from the top is the need to return to the pre-pandemic situation — as if that represented an ideal.

The focus on A and A* results in university entrance has the effect of deflecting attention away from the deeper structural problems of the class system in education.

To this we can add the distorting effect of the government’s defunding of more vocational paths to study and skills.

The main factors at play are money and values.

The fees charged by private schools, which educate well over half a million students, were almost double the spending on students in the state sector, which itself is highly stratified.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS), the gap between private school fees and state school spending per pupil has more than doubled since 2010, when the gap was about 40 per cent or £3,500.

It is a real positive that nearly eight out of 10 university applicants gain their first choices and our collective satisfaction that millions of young people can embark on their life journey with the advantages a university degree confers cannot obscure the sharp class differences that this reveals.

Teachers of these students will have paid a high price for their success.

The reliance of GCSEs and A-levels exclusively on end-of-course exams privileges a certain set of social skills but disadvantages many, while the evidence is that the over-reliance on a “winner-takes-all” testing system and high-pressure exams can ruin the transition to adulthood.

Of course, private education buys more than small class sizes and better facilities.

The IFS quietly notes that private school attendance is largely concentrated at the very top of the income distribution and that there is also evidence to suggest that it is often motivated by wider factors, such as culture and values.

Or to put it more directly, the advantages that wealth, ownership, connections and the million threads of privilege confer upon the children of the rich.

Labour’s laudable proposal to remove tax exemptions from private schools and to levy VAT on private school fees would raise about £1.6 billion to be spent in the state sector.

This would end a public subsidy to private education and spend the money more usefully.

The IFS makes the point that this will not make much of an impact on the size or role of private privilege in education.

We can make the point that working-class state power and socialism would.