Now Boris – who was learning his Latin at a prep school just up the road from mine — has decided that everyone should know what the word pleb means. He has earmarked £4 million for Latin teaching in state schools. Levelling up, Boris calls it. Cynics, however, might question whether this is little more than some culture war distraction from a general asset stripping of the humanities, with university arts subjects, for instance, facing a devastating 50% cut in funding. A paltry £4 million hardly disguises the continual shift in education away from cultural subjects towards market-useful STEM subjects. Arachis hypogaea is the Latin for peanuts.

Now I really should be passionately against all this Latin revivalism, however modest. Not only was Latin the language of regular childhood thrashings, in adult life it has become for me a kind of shorthand for the crucifixion of Jesus. Christianity began life as a small offshoot of Judaism, persecuted by Roman imperialism. In first-century Palestine, Latin was the language of the oppressor. And it was the Romans that crucified Him. The whole logic of the Roman world order was to destroy everyone and everything that posed a threat to its totalising rule. “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” is not some clever compromise division of all that there is into the earthly and the heavenly.

All things belong to God, without remainder. And crucifixion was the Roman’s signature punishment, designed to terrorise those who defied their hegemony. With crucifixion, “the symbol which had spoken of Caesar’s naked might now spoke of God’s naked love”, as NT Wright memorably put it. Amo, Amas, Amat meant something very different now.

Of course, all this came to be obscured when the Latin world hijacked His religion, making Rome itself the capital of Western Christianity. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin and so the language that may have been used by Roman soldiers as they poked him with their spears and taunted Him with insults — or, at least, the language they took their orders in — became the official language of the faith itself. The Roman Catholic church, otherwise known as the Latin church, buried all this. Originally, at least, Latin was the language of the enemy.

So, given that I harbour theological instincts that would make Ian Paisley blush, how come I think Boris is really onto something with this whole Latin experiment? Because, primarily, it represents a small move against the thoroughly depressing idea that education exists simply to serve the needs of employers. What I like about Latin is precisely its relative uselessness, the very thing that its opponents also point to as a reason not to like it. Shouldn’t we be learning Mandarin, or Spanish, they argue? Useful subjects, ones that will help us negotiate new trade deals and induct us into the up-and-coming language of global power.

I know that there are those who insist that Latin is, after all, terribly useful — being the root of so many other languages, useful for doctors etc. But that misses the point. As the Bishop of Worcester recently pointed out, education is like friendship, something that is valuable in and of itself, and not for what else can be gained by it. Education that is designed to meet some specific economic end is not education but training, the instrumentalisation of something that should be loved for its own sake. Latin is perfectly suited for this end.

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Even more surprising, I also find myself in some sympathy with those Roman Catholics who have recently been told that the use of the Latin Mass is to be restricted, with the present Pope seeking to bring what he takes to be dissident congregations more closely under the control of his Bishops. It seems that Latin worship has become a redoubt for all those who would stand against the progressive theology of the Second Vatican Council. And while I do not share this view — and it’s not really my fight — the church should be a broad enough tent to accommodate those who want to worship in the traditional language of the Latin church. Latin confers a kind of dignity to worship that that stands in sharp contrast to the whole direction of modern liturgy that too often just wants to get all chummy with the divine, talking to God in the same way one might talk to your mate. Latin sets God at a distance, which is no bad thing in an age that has consistently prized immanence over transcendence.

Yes, of course, good and brave men died to give us religion in the vernacular. William Tyndale was burned at the stake for daring to translate the Bible into English. I am delighted that within a few years of his martyrdom, the English Bible was officially sanctioned by church and state. But the culture war of the Reformation is over. No one is forcing us to worship in Latin anymore. That fight has been well and truly won.

Latin, then, has always been the location of culture wars and I have many reasons to hate it. But these days, I no longer feel the need to repeat that old schoolboy dictum: “Latin is a language as a dead as dead can be, it killed the ancient Romans and now is killing me.” Latin stands out in the modern curriculum not as a marker of social privilege, nor as the language of imperial authority, but as a refusal to allow education to be co-opted by market-obsessed philistinism. Some languages are all the better for being dead. Which is why, notwithstanding the memory of all those lines on the back of my legs, I too hope that my children will one day learn the language of what I used to call ‘the enemy’.

35 years ago, the government felt the need to add section 43 to the Education (No.2) Act 1986; it required universities to uphold freedom of speech, and was passed in response to a spate of No Platformings that feel depressingly familiar. “The most dishonourable case”, it was said, “was at Sunderland Polytechnic, where the Jewish Society was banned on the pretext that all Zionists are racists”. “From the objectionable to the absurd,” the Bill’s sponsor continued drily, “Guildford law school banned the Solicitor-General.”

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But it’s not quite plus ça change. Manchester University’s students may have been spraying Michael Heseltine with red paint when he visited in 1983, but this year the institution graduated to deprecating the use of the word “mother”. Things do seem to have become worse.

Gavin Williamson certainly seems to think so. Yesterday, as he introduced The Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill in Parliament, the Education Secretary declared it a “milestone moment,” promising to counter “the chilling effect of censorship on campus once and for all.”

The plan, first proposed by Williamson in February, is that instead of the toothless statutory duty we have now — a prescription without a penalty — academics and students who suffer for their speech will in future be able to sue for damages. And universities will have to “actively promote” free speech rather than merely “secure” it. In a similar vein, the requirement to maintain a Free Speech Code of Practice will be transformed — into a requirement to maintain a Free Speech Code of Practice “with minimum standards”. There will be Free Speech Champions. And a new Regulator.

The reaction to the White Paper on this Bill was divided along expected lines: excitement from the Telegraph, disdain from the Guardian. But while it might look like a step in the right direction, is any of it really capable of reducing self-censorship — or what Williamson refers to as “a climate where individual staff members are fearful regarding their employment status”? The Index on Censorship, in its lukewarm response, noted that “you simply can’t legislate for cultural change”. The Right would do well to ponder that observation.

The reality is that unless academics and students are given legal protection from capricious dismissal for politically unorthodox speech, Williamson’s changes are likely to be ineffective. They do not plug the hole in the hull, which is that in order to sack someone, a university need only deem their utterance “unlawful” — without any finding by any court. And given the current state of the criminal law, it’s all too easy for an HR department to make a semi-plausible — but wrong — finding of unlawfulness.

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New Progressives — I’m staying away from the w-word — are fond of remarking that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. They sometimes try to draw a neat line beneath state-sponsored repercussions and hope no one notices that there are all sorts of other consequences that have the effect of restricting free speech in a way we might sensibly want to change. But they do have a point: if, by way of example, I form the opinion that the category of people-who-menstruate no longer merits its own short word for everyday use, and you express the contrary view, I am free to uninvite you to my dinner party, for instance, or refuse to co-author a paper with you.

So, if it’s from fear of social or professional rejection that self-censorship arises, there may not be much that anyone — even a Free Speech Champion — can do. But if the fear is of losing your job — or, as a student, greatly reducing your chances of ever finding one — the outlook is brighter: dismissal for speech transgressions could be outlawed in the absence of an actual criminal conviction. And the criminal law itself could usefully be simplified.

Much of our speech-crime legislation has become difficult to interpret in a fair and consistent way. For example, the least serious of these offences (section 5 Public Order Act 1986) has as its key elements words that mean different things to different people — threatening, abusive, harassment, alarm, distress. The same is true of the “Improper Use” offence in section 127 of the Communications Act 2003: offensive, indecent, menacing, annoyance, anxiety. The problem isn’t that meanings change over time — that’s expected, desirable even — it’s that we no longer have shared definitions for this kind of vocab.

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When, following a long campaign, the word “insulting” was removed from the section 5 offence in 2013, the Home Secretary Theresa May begrudgingly accepted the change on the basis that Keir Starmer, then Director of Public Prosecutions, had assured her that “abusive” pretty much covers “insulting”, so it didn’t really matter. Some would disagree. And in 2021, many more would disagree, and more vehemently, about what is or is not covered by “abusive”.

The District Judge in the Kate Scottow trial last year (she referred to trans activist Stephanie Hayden as a “pig in a wig”) found her mis-gendering of Hayden to be “abusive”. The excoriating judgment in Scottow’s successful appeal to the High Court expressed no specific view on that point (because it didn’t need to in order to determine the appeal) but the tone and extent of the criticism of the District Judge’s approach suggests that it might well have concluded differently. Mr Justice Warby (now Lord Justice) said that her analysis was “legally flawed and inadequate” and that “her reasoning is deficient”. These are strong words by the linguistic conventions of the higher courts.

And if a District Judge can’t get this stuff right, what hope is there for University HR managers, and internal disciplinary panellists? Their judgment could deprive any tweeting student or lecturer of a livelihood. This decision, this power, should be removed from them.

If we want to secure freedom of speech in the long-term we must be clear about our purpose. And it shouldn’t just be the hope of a quick win in the current culture war. We all have a principled passion for our own particular brand of “tolerance”. Each side accuses the other of intolerance — and both are right. There is an intolerance inherent in the expressing of any idea, because time and attention are limited. I might sincerely claim to defend to the death your right to say something, but if I’m talking, you’re not. My ideas, my memes, which replicate between minds as genes do in bodies, are looking for the chance to spread in place of yours. That’s what a culture war is, and it’s never-ending.

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So the reason we should want to protect free speech is to allow the process of cultural evolution to operate smoothly over time, rather than in calamitous bursts after long periods of sclerosis. Of course, periods of stability punctuated by flashes of turmoil might well be how culture naturally evolves. But if unpopular speech is too heavily suppressed, the periods of stasis will be unnaturally long. Most unpopular ideas are unpopular for good reason, but the truth is some turn out to be correct.

So let’s not rearrange deckchairs. Free Speech Champions have made for solid headlines, but they will be seen by many persuadable non-Tories as a sad little army of libertarian proctor-generals, and will have a predictably alienating effect. Instead, we should take care of the hull of the ship: sharpen up the vagaries of the criminal law, and prevent university authorities from applying it.

Freedom of speech urgently needs to be rescued from the battlefield of the culture war. We must acknowledge, for our long-term cultural prosperity, that it forms part of the rules of the game, rather than one of the prizes. The Government has a rare opportunity, with its large majority, to entrench an enduring basic level of free speech — by imposing sensible limits on the consequences of transgression. It should take that opportunity, and take care not to jeopardise support for it with ineffective meddling. For all its noisy “raft of measures” ambition, the new Bill looks a lot like a pruning that leaves the root of the problem unaffected.

“They’re just going to kill us all, from the inside.” Emma turned 16 years old in June. That was her response when the Government announced that London and the South East, where we live, would enter Tier 4 restrictions last month. But in the weeks since, as the Department for Education has stumbled from one U-turn to another, her fury has given way to frustration. As to the recent rumour-mill about whether schools would reopen, her standard response has been a cynical eye-roll.

After all, throughout this crisis Gavin Williamson has claimed that the education of children has always been “an absolute priority”. At the weekend, he even proclaimed that “we must move heaven and earth to get children back to the classroom.” Yet the narrative that has dominated the debate over school closures in the past year tells a very different story.

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Indeed, of all the most egregious elements of Britain’s chaotic battle with Covid-19, it seems that the weaponisation of education could be the most damaging. From the moment the pandemic gripped Britain, both the print and broadcast media have persistently presented schools as little more than petri dishes, and pupils as little more than germs on legs. As Mary Bousted, the National Education Union’s joint general secretary put it in May, pupils are “mucky, who spread germs”.

In the months since, as confusion and uncertainty have morphed into charged animosity, we seem to be in an even worse position than we were back in the spring. Much of the concern surrounding the impact of school closures has tended to focus on the considerable welfare implications for children from deprived or abusive backgrounds. There can be little doubt that those from disadvantaged households, for whom the classroom both offered an escape and a ladder, will invariably be left worse off by being banned from the classroom.

But as a sociologist and university lecturer, I fear this focus on welfare leaves little scope for discussion about the importance of schools as educational institutions. Indeed, the Government’s stated aim to keep schools open by turning them into mass Covid testing centres suggests that it sees them primarily as an arm of the public health state.

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Crucially, the closure of schools could also have far deeper implications — not just for young people but, as educational values are eroded, for society as a whole. For schools are so much more than a collection of classrooms. They are the place where the adult world meets the child world, where social norms and values are communicated across the generations. They are the place that lifts children outside of the febrile tensions of their daily existence and gives them a wider perspective on the human condition and a grounding for their futures. Even with the best will in the world, online learning can never be a substitute for that.

Unlike any other period in recent history, those coming of age today have been forced into an acutely intimate engagement with politicians as they wait for daily updates about whether they will be allowed to go to school or university, sit their exams, see their friends, keep their jobs or indeed do anything that they were previously told was crucial for their mental health, emotional development, and future careers.

They have found themselves on the sharp end of a vicious public narrative of ‘Covidiot shaming’, which has blamed young people for spreading the virus by daring to go about their normal lives: visiting the beach or cafes with friends in summer, going to university or school before Christmas.

This hounding tendency has had practical, and often visceral, consequences. When headlines last summer screeched that university students might ‘seed the virus’ across the land, a number of universities responded by introducing measures more akin to young offenders’ institutions than to places of higher learning. They demanded that students study from the confines of their bedrooms and erected metal barriers around halls of residence that were patrolled by security guards in case they fancied a walk or, heaven forbid, a visit to the library.

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At the same time, although many teachers — including Emma’s — have since gone above and beyond in their attempts to restore as ‘normal’ an educational regime as possible, the alienation caused by social distancing practices and the plummeting of attendance has given schools a conditional stop-start quality, which keeps children, teachers and parents constantly on edge, further increasing anxiety and demoralisation. Rows between parents and schools over social distancing, the necessity for keeping windows open in freezing cold classrooms and sanctions for Covid non-compliance have only exacerbated existing tensions between home and school.

And this is where things could start to get messy. For running parallel to the attempts of Britain’s leaders to impose political authority on the Covid chaos, Britain’s children have been subjected to an altogether different — and possibly more dangerous — crisis of authority as their parents and teachers become progressively infantilised by a web of ever-changing rules that they have to obey.

Take the Government’s orders for people to ‘Stay at home’, which — while many will claim are necessary to halt the spread of the virus — operate in an uneasy and destructive relationship with parental authority. Whether they like it or not, parents are responsible for ensuring compliance with these measures, even when they contradict their instinctive worries about the negative impact on their children’s physical and mental health, education and relationships.

For children, their parents’ constant need to adapt to ‘the rules’ has resulted in a string of shattered plans, broken promises and arbitrary decisions about where they are allowed to go, what they are allowed to do, and who they are see. As is to be expected, the impact is slightly different in teenagers. At an age that would typically render them on the cusp of independence, they find themselves no longer able to push against the authority of their parents in the small ways that they have always done, unless they wish to invoke the wrath of the state. Meanwhile, those parents tempted to assert their own authority against the excesses of ‘the rules’ will be fully aware that doing so would draw their children into conflict with official public health advice, thereby contributing to further corrosion of political trust and social solidarity. They simply cannot win.

No doubt some will scoff that this is a small price to pay for necessary measures in the face of a deadly pandemic; that at least the number of Covid-induced deaths will be reduced. In that vein, a sharp rise in mental health problems among the young, evidence of widening educational inequality and concerns about the debilitating effects of a year without sustained social interaction are shrugged off as necessary casualties in the fight against the virus.

But all that forgets that, whether we like it or not, the relentless attacks on our children’s spirit will leave a mark. When schools do reopen, it won’t just be young people’s education that has taken a bashing. It will be their trust in all the norms, expectations, and institutions of adult society. And what could be more disturbing than that? 

The Corona Generation: Coming of age in a crisis by Dr Jennie Bristow and Emma Gilland is published by Zer0 Books.

Hence the drama of the post-election reshuffle, back in February. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid Javid, was told to sack his advisors and make room for a team of Downing Street heavies. Honourably, he refused — and so he was forced out too.

The message was unambiguous: the whole Cabinet, from the Chancellor down, would have to submit to central control — or else. Henceforth, the relationship between Number 10 and every minister, no matter how senior, would be modelled on that between Matthew Corbett and Sooty.

And yet the puppet show has not gone to plan.

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Last month, the chief puppeteer — Dominic Cummings — lost the battle for Downing Street. While he’d eliminated all resistance in the Cabinet room, he hadn’t accounted for the upstairs flat. Big mistake.

And then there’s the Prime Minister himself — who these days looks like a ghost at his own feast. All leaders fade away eventually, but the pace of events has accelerated his career trajectory. To sink from conquering hero to yesterday’s man in a space of a year is going some.

Finally, and most tellingly, there are the puppets. The supposedly synchronised Cabinet is all over the place. Their individual performances range from stellar to abysmal. So, as it turns out, who you appoint to the top jobs still matters, no matter how centralised your style of government. Eight examples prove the point:

1. Rishi Sunak

Two years ago, Rishi Sunak was the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Local Government — just about the most junior of junior ministers. Now, he’s Chancellor of the Exchequer and the favourite to succeed his boss. There was never any doubting his potential, but he owes his meteoric rise to Boris Johnson’s model of government.

It’s an age-old trick: ensure loyalty by promoting those who haven’t earned it. Appointees are indebted to their patrons; and the principle of ‘easy come, easy go’ means it’s straightforward to dispense with them. Look down the list of Secretaries of State and you’ll find one example after another.

With Sunak, however, the cipher turned out to be a star. Which is just as well, given events. As a competent manager and reassuring communicator, he’s implemented crisis socialism without freaking out the markets, the public or his own party.

We’ve also seen some hints of creativity. He’ll need more, though, because you can’t recover from an unprecedented crisis without new ideas. His proposal for a National Infrastructure Bank is a key test. If it can raise and lend money like a real bank (instead of just being glorified government fund), we might just be able to ‘build back better’.

2. Dominic Raab

The idea of a politician ‘rising without trace’ has become a cliché, but it’s a fitting description of Raab’s CV. As Foreign Secretary (and, before that, Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union), Brexit should have been the making or breaking of him. But Brexit policy consists of two kinds of decision — the really big ones made by the Prime Minister and the excruciatingly fine detail handled by the negotiating team. There’s nothing much in between for the Cabinet minister.

The fact is that Raab is in the wrong job — appointed to the FCO not for what he can do, but for what he represents (i.e. the Eurosceptic Right of his party). For the Cabinet’s tough guy it’s a mismatch — like putting Chuck Norris in charge of a Swiss finishing school. Raab needs a big spending department to run; and though that would technically be a demotion, it would be the best thing that could happen to him.

3. Priti Patel

The Home Secretary was also appointed to make a point. A hardliner on both Brexit and immigration, her elevation from the backbenches to one of the great offices of state was a clear signal of the government’s intention to get Brexit done and control our borders.

Of course, she was only on the backbenches because she’d resigned from the Cabinet in 2017 after unauthorised meetings with the Israeli government came to light. Few people expected her to return to office so soon, or indeed at all; but salvaging a capsized career is another way in which Downing Street can ensure the loyalty of its appointees.

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Since her return, Patel has again fallen foul of the ministerial code — this time in regard to bullying allegations. Despite the official enquiry into the matter, she escaped unscathed. Two things protected her: first, the self-defeating nastiness of the Left — which loves to target women and people of colour who dare to have the ‘wrong’ opinions; and, second, the fact that Patel, despite her obvious limitations, is stubbornly pushing forward on the immigration reforms that were promised in the Conservative manifesto.

Of course, it’s one thing to tighten border control in theory, another to maintain it in practice. As with all Home Secretaries, Patel’s fate ultimately depends on upholding the law as it stands.

4. Matt Hancock

The Secretary of State for Health gives every impression of being another rapid riser. In fact, he had five years in junior ministerial roles before making it to Cabinet — which is an eternity these days. This year, he’s had to draw on every scrap of his experience.

It’s unclear how Hancock will be judged by history (and the inevitable public enquiries) — because the record is so mixed. Will he be remembered for the various test-and-trace fiascos or the triumphs of vaccine policy? How does one balance the failure to protect our care homes from Covid with the fact that the NHS has not been overwhelmed by the greatest challenge in its history?

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Secretary of State for Health and Social Care is a big job at the best of times. But in 2020 it grew too big for any one incumbent. A Government that understood the importance of ministers would have carved out special Covid-related roles at Cabinet level (a test-and-trace minister, for instance) — leaving the Health Secretary to focus exclusively on the core issues.

Churchill’s wartime Cabinet was reshaped around the demands of the war effort — and something similar should have happened in this war too.

5. Michael Gove

Michael Gove is by far the most experienced member of the Cabinet. Apart from a brief period of exile following the Brexit referendum, he’s been a senior figure since 2010 — serving three Prime Ministers.

Paradoxically, he’s survived for so long by embracing unpopularity. He’s the political equivalent of a sin-eater: the outcasts who were once paid to take on the sins of others through the consumption of a ritual meal. Of late, these meals have been substantial — with Gove sent out to defend the Government through its imperfect improvisations of lockdown policy.

Allied to his knowledge of the inner workings of the Whitehall machine, Gove has become indispensable. And yet his talents could be better deployed. He is, at heart, a radical — willing to pursue reform in the face of entrenched opposition. As soon as the Covid crisis is over, he should be put in charge of solving another problem that’s been left unsolved for the last decade or more: housing.

6. Robert Jenrick

This would be a good point at which to examine the record of the latest Secretary of State who hasn’t solved the housing crisis. Robert Jenrick is the sixth Cabinet minister in this role since 2010. Some have been real talents, others not so much, and none has been left in post long enough to sort out Britain’s single greatest structural problem.

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Indeed, none has been allowed to state the obvious, which is that rampant house price inflation is a bad thing. If the Conservatives want to rescue Generation Rent and revive their vision of a property-owning democracy, then house prices must fall relative to wages.

A generic placeman such as Jenrick is incapable of true reform. His atrocious planning white paper maintains the fiction that the planning system is to blame for the housing crisis — instead of the land bankers. If Boris is serious about building back better then he needs to set Gove loose on the vested interests standing in the way.

7. Gavin Williamson

Oh dear, what can one say? Any politician capable of a media performance like this one has no business being a minister, let alone a Cabinet minister.

In any case, Williamson is unlikely to survive the next reshuffle — not after the results debacle earlier this year. He wasn’t to blame for the closure of schools during lockdown and the cancellation of exams. However, he did oversee the grade allocation algorithm that caused such upset and fury.

His department made the classic mistake of targeting one objective — i.e. the prevention of grade inflation — without considering the wider ramifications. In particular, the downward adjustment of grades based on the past performance not only of the pupil but also the school could not have been more contrary to the principle of levelling up. If you want to succeed as a government’s minister, then best not to drive a coach-and-horses through its domestic agenda.

Robert Jenrick’s housing target algorithm is a similar fiasco — and a further lesson in the foolishness of entrusting policy to mindless robots.

8. Liz Truss

Liz Truss isn’t exactly my kind of conservative. Her infamous tribute to a generation of “#Uber-riding #Airbnb-ing #Deliveroo-eating #freedomfighters” didn’t just make me cringe, but evoked a soul-crushing void.

But, fair’s fair, she’s done a decent job as Secretary of State for International Trade. It’s still early days, but to rebuild a long-abandoned function of sovereign government (i.e. trade diplomacy) is a painstaking task that she’s diligently got on with.

It remains to be seen what purpose this new capacity will be put to — especially when it comes to the looming trade deal with America. The fate of the British countryside hangs in the balance and I hope that Truss makes a stand for the things that matter more than the bottom line. You wouldn’t want to feed chlorine chicken to those Deliveroo-eating freedom fighters, would you Liz?

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Nevertheless, she’s had a good year. While she bombed at DEFRA and as Lord Chancellor, she’s undoubtedly found her niche. Which goes to show that getting the right people into Cabinet is only half the struggle. The other half is getting them into the right positions.

Perhaps Downing Street should stop appointing people to roles that they haven’t actually asked for. Instead they should invite applications from candidates who actually want to do each job. They’d thus be able to prepare for the position, think about what they want to do with it and then present their case to the appropriate decision-makers.

I know, it’s a crazy idea — but it seems to work for well-run organisations.

Exams are a blunt instrument. They assess performance on the day, not ability. But when they were cancelled, they left a gaping hole in an education system that depends on the grades they spit out. If only we had an oracle that could see into the mind of each student and judge them: a statistical model, objective, fair, and well-fed on data from every student in the country. So that’s what Ofqual built.

Then, around 40% of the A level grades awarded by the algorithm fell below the teacher predictions for the student in that subject. Cue teenage demonstrations and widespread political recrimination. But, contrary to what students may have expected, those teacher predictions were never the starting point for the awarded grades. In many cases, they didn’t even form part of the calculation.

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Instead, the system was designed to give an overall distribution of grades that looked similar to previous years, with similar numbers of A*, A, and all the other grades for each subject — though they did allow more A and A* grades than usual. Ofqual even went so far as to check that the proportion of grades handed out to different subpopulations (by gender, ethnicity and deprivation, for example) would look similar to recent years. If your definition of fairness is that boys, or claimants of Free School Meals, won’t do demonstrably worse than last year, you should be happy.

Ofqual’s Direct Centre Performance model is based on the record of each centre (school or college) in the subject being assessed. Whatever the range and distribution of grades achieved by previous students over the last three years, that is the range of grades allocated to the class who would have taken A-levels in 2020. There was some adjustment, if your class has shown better (or worse) performance than its predecessors in GCSEs or other previous assessments, or if other changes would leave the national distribution of grades looking too different from previous years.

Meanwhile, each teacher was asked to rank each class from highest to lowest in expected achievement. That ranking, not predicted grades, was used to slot each student into the predetermined range of grades from A* to U. The exception to this was small groups, less than 15 in most cases, where Ofqual did resort to teachers’ predicted grades. That is why less popular subjects and smaller schools have seen less marking-down from expected grades.

Any one individual’s achievements so far, or their potential in the view of teachers who know them, had less influence on their eventual results than the attainments of others who attended the same school in past years. It’s closer to buying car insurance than taking an exam for which you have worked for nearly two years. Just enter postcode, make and model and we will predict your likelihood of making a claim, and hence your premium.

This wasn’t inevitable. “Any statistical algorithm embeds a range of judgments and choices; it is not simply a technically obvious and neutral procedure,” wrote the Royal Statistical Society (RSS) in a scathing statement published on 6 August. “Calibrating this year’s estimated grades to previous years’ exam results is one such choice. How to take account of evidence of individual students’ prior attainment is another. How to take account of uncertainty is another.”

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I asked Professor Guy Nason, Chair in Statistics at Imperial College, London, and fellow of the RSS, what Ofqual could have done differently. He was surprised that the UK had not attempted any kind of socially-distanced, in-person assessments, as some other European countries had done. But, given that some kind of statistical grade allocation was needed, Guy pointed out some specific pitfalls that could have been avoided, if a wider range of experts had been involved at an earlier stage.

“Overall, I think they ignored, or in some cases, underestimated uncertainty in many steps of their process. For example, the teacher-provided rankings for students within a subject were treated as if they were correct, when, in all likelihood, they are subject to considerable uncertainty. So, for example, tied rankings were not permitted, which might have resulted in students being assigned different grades even though their Centre thought that they were indistinguishable.” He also thought it was unfair to assess students by a completely different method if they happened to be part of a small class.

Nason had serious concerns about how Ofqual tested the predictive ability of their algorithm. “You’ve got to run a fair test, one that runs under the same conditions as the real deal.”

The normal way to test a predictive algorithm is to see how good it is at predicting the past. That is, you run the program for the previous year and see how well its predictions match what happened in real life. Ofqual did that for 2019, but because teachers in previous years were not asked to rank students, Ofqual could not use 2019’s teacher-generated rank orders for a test run.

Instead, it used the rank order that emerged from the 2019 exam results. Which is like showing you can predict the results of a horse race by including data about the order in which the horses crossed the finish line in that same race. “If a test uses aspects of the same data that it is trying to predict, then it results in a false sense of security,” says Nason.

Even by including some of the data they were trying to predict, Ofqual found their accuracy in predicting exact grades ranged from two thirds for History to one in four for Italian. For most non-language subjects, over nine in 10 students would be within one grade of the true result, but 3% of Maths students (for example) missing a fair result by two grades or more adds up to a lot of teenagers. Over 10% of Further Maths students, ironically the only ones who can understand the tortuous workings of the algorithm that betrayed them, would be over a grade away from a fair result.

“Their algorithm’s predictability is, especially for some subjects, not that good anyway, but if you then realise that they are over-optimistic and cannot be trusted, then one has to really question whether the algorithm is fit for purpose,” says Guy.

This isn’t just hindsight talking. The RSS offered to nominate two distinguished experts to the Ofqual technical advisory group in March. Guy was one of them. But Ofqual wanted to impose a Non-Disclosure Agreement that would bar them from public comment on the model for five years, in direct contradiction of the Society’s commitment to transparency and public trust.

Ofqual also ignored the House of Commons Education Select Committee’s call to publish details of their methods before releasing the results. They might have been spared some of the post-hoc dissection of their work, before public outcry and political pain caused Monday’s abandonment of the algorithm.

Because the grading algorithm has been withdrawn for political, not statistical reasons.

Its workings seem to have hit harder the very students who already felt the cards were stacked against them, and the communities to whom this government promised “levelling up”. Students in state schools and FE colleges, especially, and more deprived students, saw their awarded grades fall well short of their teacher-predicted grades.

It’s no surprise that small teaching groups, and less popular A-levels like Law, Ancient Greek and Music, are more common at private schools, which insulated those students from being marked down. Nor that previous results in selective and private schools would have been higher, bequeathing a higher range of grades to this year’s cohort.

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But the picture is messier than that. Historically, teachers in large state schools, and of more deprived students, have been more likely to over-predict. There may be good reasons for this. Teachers may consciously give a student the benefit of the doubt, figuring that it at least gives them a shot at a good university place. If they fall short, they can haggle later. If they exceed more honest expectations, it might be too late for them to raise their sights.

And in a high-attaining school where students routinely get A and A* exam results, there is not much headroom for over-optimism, unlike schools whose students walk away with the full range from A* to U.

Whatever the causes, that over-prediction means that every year state school students are more likely to find their exam results lower than their predicted grades. Universities are often flexible, recognising that it’s easier to get good grades in a good school, and that students who fought harder for OK results often do better at university than the ones who got good results in easier circumstances.

It’s bitter to be disappointed with your exam results. Perhaps, like me in those Stats exams, you turned over the paper and finally acknowledged, too late, how poorly your work matched the standards expected for the subject. But even if you were unlucky on the day with what was on the paper, or with your own state of mind, you still had your chance to do the best you could.

To find that a faceless system has allocated you to a lower grade, simply because your school hasn’t previously achieved much in this subject, looks like the epitome of systematic unfairness. Why did you bother to put in all that work, only to be pre-judged on the assumption that you’re homogenous with your older schoolmates?

That’s the embarrassing truth about algorithms. They are prejudice engines. Whenever an algorithm turns data from the past into a model, and projects that model into the future to be used for prediction, it is working on a number of assumptions. One of the more basic assumptions is that the future will look like the past and the present, in significant ways.

You may think you can beat the odds stacked against you by your low-attaining school, and your lack of extra-curricular extras, and your having to do homework perched on your bed in a shared bedroom, but the algorithm thinks otherwise. Isn’t it strange that we are repelled by prejudice in other contexts, but accept it when it’s automated?

Until now. Now school students shouting “Fuck The Algorithm” have forced a Government U-turn. Some of them seem to think the whole business was an elaborate ploy to punish the poor, instead of a clumsy attempt at automated fairness on a population scale. But some of them must be wondering what other algorithms are ignoring their human agency and excluding them from options in life because of what others did before them: Car insurance? Job adverts? Dating apps? Mortgage offers?

Some disgruntled Further Maths students will no doubt go on to write better algorithms, but that won’t solve the problem. As the RSS wrote to the Office of Statistical Regulation, “‘Fairness’ is not a statistical concept. Different and reasonable people will have different judgments about what is ‘fair’, both in general and about this particular issue.”

You don’t need Maths, or Further Maths, or even a 2:2 in Maths and Statistics, to question what assumptions are being designed into mathematical models that will affect your chances in life. Anyone can argue for their idea of what fairness means. Algorithms, and what we let them decide, are too important to be left to statisticians.

So it was intriguing to read in an interview this weekend that he would be “really worried” if any of his children decided to follow him along the path of power in Westminster. In any case, while all his four children were “politically committed”, none wanted to go near parliamentary politics.

Blair bemoaned the declining calibre of today’s political class, adding that it was so poisoned by social media that he would be especially worried if his daughter decided on becoming an MP.

This is a depressing commentary on our times. What does it say about Britain’s political system when someone who so obviously thrived in it, someone who remains an astute analyst of electoral currents, feels so despondent about the harshness of its environment?

We need the best possible people in politics, so it is a problem if there is a dwindling talent pool. Look at the cabinet and there seems an obvious dearth of quality, which may help explain our country’s disastrous response to coronavirus. I asked several leading business figures which ministers they might like to employ; all struggled after a couple of obvious names at best. “The quality has definitely sunk far lower,” said Steve Richards, author of The Prime Ministers: Reflections on Leadership from Wilson to May. “Whatever your opinion, whether Left or Right, this cabinet looks the least substantial of the last 100 years.”

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The abusive inhumanity of our politics

By Polly Mackenzie

Every generation complains about its leaders; no doubt some Victorian analysts bemoaned that Disraeli and Gladstone were useless compared with Pitt, Peel and Palmerston. There are also always some time-servers, obsequious careerists and dunderheads. But just take a look around the cabinet table and compare that callow collection with the giants seen on both side of the tribal divide throughout the 20th century, many from generations forged by awful war or economic collapse and driven by deep sense of public service. Our post-war education secretaries, for instance, included Quintin Hogg, Anthony Crossland, Thatcher, Shirley Williams, Sir Keith Joseph, Ken Baker, Ken Clarke, David Blunkett, Alan Johnson, Ed Balls, Michael Gove and Justine Greening. Today it is Gavin Williamson.

There are some obvious reasons for this sorry state of affairs. Brexit reshaped the Conservative party, forcing out several heavyweight figures. Boris Johnson runs a highly partisan operation, a sign of insecurity that permits no dissent. Labour endured the Corbyn nightmare and Momentum takeover, which sparked despair among moderate MPs. Both parties have hardened ideologically at local level, so people of differing opinions cannot win selection despite representing swathes of their side’s traditional terrain.

Yet the roots of this crisis go deeper, revolving around the nature of politics in an age of coarsening discourse. One obvious problem is social media, which fuels tribal division and fosters aggression especially against ethnic minority and female MPs. “The abuse I get is horrendous,” said Labour’s Naz Shah. “I accept I’ve made a couple of mistakes, none of which were intentional, but it’s become normal to get horrible stuff all the time. Last week I was told to go back to Pakistan, then told I was racist. You have to have an almost psychotic desire to change the world to endure this abuse. The average person would step away.”

Then there is the changing nature of the job. The Tories have adopted the Liberal Party style of pavement politics over the past decade. This led to a shift towards MPs, especially in marginal seats, serving as local representatives rather than seeking to become national voices. Meanwhile well-connected advisers and A-listers were handed the safest seats. “For the past four general elections, CCHQ has increasingly co-opted safe seats for the favoured view, supplying associations with narrow, heavily-vetted shortlists,” said one long-serving member of the party board. “In the ’92 election a safe seat would often receive upwards of 300 CVs but by 2019 this was managed down to three. Open selections are deemed to carry too much risk as they can’t be guaranteed to produce the right result.”

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Minority women can think for themselves

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This Tory said marginal seats reflect the “collapsing attraction” of parliamentary politics — but even winnable seats now receive fewer applications than in previous decades. “Too much risk for too low a status.” Much debate has focused on pay, but politics can never offer competitive rates for talent against worlds such as law and finance. “Successful people are willing to take a step back on salary for status and job satisfaction,” he said. “Strip those away and what is left?”

Their workload, like in so many professions, has increased and comes with a ceaseless deluge of emails — often organised by campaigning charities and pressure groups — and a constant struggle to escape their endlessly bleeping phones. In the chilling words of one female Labour MP: “Who wants to be away from the family and work all the time only to get death threats?” They also face pressure to concentrate on issues of local concern. “Once an MP could have got away with focusing on foreign affairs all the time if they wanted, but not now,” said a Tory backbencher. It is valid to ask whether this blinkered approach, however logical, is always best for the nation’s interests?

Another senior Tory MP put it starkly, with an apology for his pessimism: “The job is about survival,” he said. “It has become very, very attritional which is emotionally draining and physically taxing. It is a state of constant warfare that eats away at your self-worth. You are frightened the whole time — it’s like being under siege. We’ll end up only with people that have rhino skins rather than caring. Meanwhile demands on your time from constituents are constantly accelerating and much of it is not doing the helping of people that gives such satisfaction.”

When I ask this Brexiteer, a respected figure across Westminster, if there had been an impact on the calibre of people in politics, his reply was unequivocal. “Of course it has gone down. You can see that on all sides.” Perhaps the only way forward is to accept the decline and open up cabinet posts from outside parliament, subject to accountability. Yet this feels defeatist and counter to our democratic traditions.

I have met many decent and dedicated people in politics. Yet the prevailing view of the public — inflamed by the scandal over expenses, the banking crisis and Brexit — is to see Westminster as filled with duplicitous self-servers who all deserve scorn. One Tory MP who has focused energy on fighting racism, often in unfashionable areas such as mental health, told me he was frustrated by being repeatedly called racist due to anger on the ground. Such attitudes have been fuelled by the media, symbolised by the idea Jeremy Paxman approached all political interviews asking himself: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” Perhaps like many columnists, writing fast in the heat of the moment, I have gone overboard myself at times.

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Who will lead the post-Covid world?

By Ian Birrell

One poll last year found just four per cent of respondents feel properly represented in national politics. Yet studies have found women are only half as likely as men to be interested in standing for political office while poorer, less well-educated and working-class people tend to be less ambitious politically. People with disabilities are rarely seen and woefully failed by Westminster. Efforts to open up institutions, however, seem to have had less impact than expected. This will lead to “an intensification of anti-political feeling and a perceived growth in the distance separating those involved in political life from those who are not”, concluded a 2018 paper for Political Quarterly by academics Peter Allen and David Cutts. “Neither of these things should be accepted… in a healthy democracy.”

It is too simplistic to solely blame either traditional or social media for the steady corrosion of politics in this country. Both are influential, of course, but ultimately they inflame already existing attitudes in wider society. Now there are reports Downing Street plans to use worsening cultural conflicts for its own political advantage, a selfish and short-termist strategy. Yet as James Johnson, former pollster for Theresa May, told me, the public want to see more political consensus rather than division, especially on the big issues. “I saw this for myself at No 10  — people don’t operate in the partisan bubbles seen at Westminster.”

I glimpsed the hideous strength of this bubble during my brief formal time in party politics as David Cameron’s speechwriter. On the night of the 2010 coalition deal, I suggested to the new Prime Minister that he might exploit the new collegiate style of politics by allowing MPs to speak more freely on issues rather than forcing them to parrot party lines. He paused briefly, then shook his head and said it was impossible.

I remain convinced it is the remorseless spin, rooted in tribalism, that is so destructive for politics and sets the tone for much of the national debate. Ironically, a big chunk of the blame lies with Blair, who made much of Tory politicians’ personal problems under John Major — then unleashed a ruthless spin operation after winning office and deceived the public over Iraq, further eroding public trust.

This combative tribal stance is a world away from the reality of most people’s lives. It is anachronistic in an age in which traditional party loyalties have broken down. It also stops Westminster finding solutions to some of our most intractable problems, such as fixing the social care crisis, building sufficient homes or tackling drug addiction.

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The dangerous pull of political tribalism

By James Mumford

One of the finest political initiatives I have covered as a journalist was a prison reform process in Texas that spread nationwide and took the sting from the US criminal justice debate — and it began when a pair of politicians from opposing sides put aside their differences to find a solution to spiralling use of incarceration.

I was struck when Jerry Madden, a veteran Republican, explained to me how they started by working out where they disagreed, laid those issues to one side, then focused on their common ground to fix a problem that had become a costly failure destroying lives.

Is it really so naive to suggest that our own politicians might sometimes put national interests before their own sectarian struggles to solve the biggest issues? In this country, even at this time of grave crisis, our leaders talk of bold change and disruption but fear being challenged or the slightest dissent. And instead of reaching across the divides, we all end up retreating  deeper into our bunkers, fuming with disgust at our foes and frothing with fury over political failures.