Let's end the lottery of predicted grades

Try explaining the British university admissions system to a foreigner. They look at you as if you’re mad.

‘What you do is, you apply to university in January on the basis of what your teacher thinks you will get in a series of cliff-edge exams you sit in May/June called A-levels. Only once you get your results in mid-August – which is to say, about a month before you’re due to start – is your place at university confirmed. But that’s only if you’ve actually achieved your predicted grades. If you haven’t, you go into this thing called ‘clearing’ where you scrabble around trying to pick up places that might have fallen free…’

Perhaps the kindest way to describe our universities admissions system is ‘archaic’. Another way would be to describe it as a huge brake on the life-chances of too many of our young people. And somehow that brake has remained in place for years.