In case all this seems a digression from the topic of public schools, consider this. The Office of Fair Access (Offa) has entered into agreements with universities to ensure that they are making a full effort to identify disadvantaged students and offering them the financial and other support they will need. The “Guidance to the Director of Fair Access” issued by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills threatens that universities that fail to meet their target without good reason will be banned from charging the full fee of £9,000 per student. The real problem comes further down the line, as universities propose their way of addressing these demands. In Cambridge, it is assumed that one can measure the proportion of relatively disadvantaged students by increasing the number of state school entrants so that it matches the proportion of students in state schools who secure three A grades at A-level. It is hard to think of a cruder, more misshapen measuring stick. The category of state schools includes the remaining grammar schools as well as leading sixth-form colleges (which may be carefully selective), and a high percentage of the children coming from these schools also come from what can fairly be called middle-class backgrounds. Some children have switched from independent schools to state schools, such as a very good sixth-form college in Cambridge, to ensure that they are listed as state school entrants. In any case, something like 31 per cent of children in independent schools receive some financial support from the school so that they can continue to be educated there.

Everyone should applaud attempts to encourage children from genuinely disadvantaged backgrounds to apply to the best universities. That, indeed, is what Offa says it aims to achieve.  Much good work is done at leading universities to attract such candidates. But admissions tutors have also sometimes imposed quotas, and have told their colleagues that they can have no more boys and girls from public schools above the assigned number, forcing them to admit academically inferior candidates who may be ill-prepared for the demands of a top university and will struggle to keep up with their peers. Meanwhile, good students have been sent away with their tail between their legs, assured that they did not meet the standards required, when the real reason for rejection was positive discrimination.  The catchphrase “well-taught” sometimes signifies: “comes from an academic public school”.

Quotas leave many of us very uneasy. Years ago I came across a book in Cambridge University Library that tried to defend Mussolini’s regime, then in power in Italy. Surely, the author argued, it was necessary to address the over-representation of Jews among university professors in Italy? No one is suggesting that this discrimination is on that scale, but I would suggest that it lies along the same spectrum.

Positive discrimination helps no one, least of all those who are catapulted into a role for which they are not really prepared. There is a marvellous passage in the Bible, not a work most people turn to nowadays for moral guidance: “You shall do no injustice in judgment. You shall not favour the poor, nor honour the powerful” (Leviticus 19:15). That sense of balance needs to be restored.