It’s mid-August, and that means it’s time for the annual A-levels ritual.

The routine is always the same. Publication of the results – this year, as always, a record high - is met with a chorus of condemnation that standards are clearly slipping. And then an education minister takes to the airwaves and protests that pupils are simply being taught better, and instead of carping we should all take pride.

Yesterday the job fell to Lord Adonis, formerly Tony Blair’s key education adviser and, since May, a minister at the Department for Education.

Sticking to the usual script, he argued that we should all “have full
confidence that standards are being maintained." Indeed, he added:
“Teaching and leadership in schools are significantly improving, so we should expect exam results to improve too. It would be a major cause for concern if they didn't."

Lord Adonis is caught in a bind. He, of all people, knows how bad standards have been in the state sector. He has spent most of Labour’s period in office wrestling with the vested interests of the local education authorities and teaching unions - and within the Department itself – to
bring about change. Specialist schools, city academies and special
arrangements for gifted pupils all emanated from his desk in Downing Street.

As Tony Blair contemplates his legacy, the Prime Minister knows that progress towards real education reform – putting parents in the driving seat and offering them a genuine choice of good state funded schools – is still not fast enough. And so he decided to take matters into his own hands, and moved his former Education advisor out of his back seat and directly into a ministerial job at the department.

Lord Adonis’ problem however, is that whatever he might say in defence of A-level standards, he knows that there are far more fundamental problems which need to be tackled. I am in a better position than most to know this - since he and I wrote a book about them.

It was published in 1997, the year Labour took office. Remember Tony Blair’s election motto, ‘education, education and education’? Our book’s argument – the analysis which underpinned that campaign slogan - was that education is the great engine of social mobility. But instead of promoting meritocracy, it was doing the reverse.

For the first two thirds of the twentieth century, the high standards of grammar schools acted as a unique spring board, opening up all sorts of areas which had previously been the preserve of the elites, from an Oxbridge degree to a career in the professions.

Andrew (as he was then) and I argued, however, that the final third of the century was very different. From the 1960s, Britain became a less socially mobile society.

Where on the social ladder a person was born predicted, with depressing accuracy, where they would end up. The reason? The decline in state education, with coincided with – and was in large part caused by – the shift from selective to comprehensive education. That was itself a product of the view which took hold amongst politicians and educationalists that education was mainly a mechanism for social engineering rather than imparting knowledge.

This was made worse by the flight of the middle classes from state to private schooling. Every year, this educational apartheid was worsened as a new batch of entrants deserted the state sector.

Instead of debating the proper interpretation of today’s A-level results – a fruitless task which usually bores everyone senseless - it’s much more important to go look instead at these underlying problems.

Our analysis – that state education was holding back, rather than promoting, meritocracy - provided the foundations for most of Labour’s education policies and Andrew carried these beliefs with him into Number 10. The Prime Minister was an early and enthusiastic convert to this way of thinking.

But its implications go a long way further than Tony Blair has been prepared to go. Take A-levels themselves. The real crisis has nothing to do with an objective assessment of the standard of the exams. It is about something far more basic –what it is we want from our education system.

A-levels were designed to separate out those students who would be most suited by university, at a time when only ten per cent or so of school leavers went on to higher education. They did that job well.

Today, however, the consensus holds – and this is true across the political spectrum – that it is a good thing in itself for as many school leavers as possible to go to university. Mr Blair has said that he will not be happy until half make it there.

But that means that A-levels have now to do a very different job. Instead of identifying the most academically gifted, they must act as a broad badge of basic academic competence. And so they have become useless at separating the best from the mediocre.

Instead of providing an extra training for the cream of the crop, university education it has now become just another part of the average education.

That is not meritocracy. If social mobility was to be the driving force behind policy, it would mean ensuring that university places were open to the most intellectually gifted, regardless of upbringing. What has happened, however, has been effectively the same thing which happened to secondary schooling in the 1960s - the comprehensivisation of universities.

Instead of reforming secondary education so that every pupil had an education which allowed them to achieve their best, and then to compete on equal terms for a place at university, governments have merely demanded additional places and (under the Conservatives) abolished the distinction between polytechnics and universities, just as they did with grammars and secondary moderns.

My old friend Lord Adonis now faces the classic dilemma of the thinker turned politician. Thinkers are unconstrained by base political
considerations. They can say it as it is. In our book, we pointed out that the pass was sold by the abolition of selective education - though this may not be somethig Lord Adonis would wish to highligh as a Labour minister today.

New Labour knows this, but cannot bring itself to admit it. That’s why it talks about the need for ‘specialist’ schools, but shies away from the word ‘selective’. And it’s why it talks approvingly about specialisation based on pupils’ ‘aptitude’ but condemns it by ‘ability’? I defy anyone to point out a real difference between the words, which serve – deliberately - only to obscure the real issues.

Real reform requires Lord Adonis – and Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary - to ignore the political risks of speaking the truth, and to fundamentally recast a system which remains recognisably the inheritance of the 1960s.