It’s a rather startling claim and one that given our general view of those who can’t and therefore teach one we might even believe - that all those who run Britain’s universities are idiots. We don’t quite believe it though as we’ve met some goodly portion of them.

Yet this is what is being claimed here:

Tory education reforms are giving private school pupils a huge additional advantage in the hunt for university places and jobs by allowing them to sit easier GCSEs than the more rigorous exams that are being forced upon state schools, new official figures suggest.

Data released in parliamentary answers, and research into the exams chosen by private schools, shows the extent to which the independent sector is still opting for less demanding, internationally-recognised GCSEs (IGCSEs), which state schools are progressively being barred from using.

Let’s entirely accept the underlying contentions here. That IGCSEs are easier than GCSEs, the private sector sticks with the IGCSEs and that this means that the private sector pupils are getting better exam results when we look purely at grades.

Does this give those private sector pupils an advantage when applying to university? Well, only if those running the universities are entire fools.

People applying to Britain’s gilded cloisters come from all sorts of educational backgrounds. There will be those who have come up through the British school system, those from various remnants of the colonial schooling system, baccalaureates, perhaps the international bac, we’re sure that here will be graduates of Finland’s famously egalitarian system, of Sweden’s variation, or Russia’s and so on. Even some who managed to scrape through American high school.

That is, those who select pupils for entry into the universities are already well versed in the intricacies of different sets of qualifications. Thus entirely capable of distinguishing between 15 A*s at IGCSE and 5 Cs at GCSE. Actually, if they can’t, then what are they doing there?

To believe what is being claimed is that the universities are being run by those entirely unqualified to do so. Which, if true, suggests we’ve a bit of clearing out to do rather than worrying about who takes IGCSEs no?