PERHAPS, if capitalism’s writ was permitted to run unchecked through society, our schools would become centres for educational eugenics. The state, if it still actually existed, would have no stake in these exam factories.

Instead, each group of schools in a town or district would be under the control of a consortium backed by private investment and hedge-fund speculators. All education would be fee-paying, of course, with the most successful schools free to charge exorbitantly for their services.

School departments might be sponsored by firms specialising in the appropriate disciplines. Thus, the science department with its partners Evonik, Pfizer and Biogen would be pleased to offer a suite of subjects tailored to meet the demands of a changing world. Maths would be brought to you by Tesla Inc and foreign languages would be the preserve of international airlines and holiday firms. English could be sponsored by Penguin, Harper Collins or Bloomsbury. Obviously, these firms would expect teachers to ensure their contracted authors featured heavily in their reading lists.

Further down the scale, local firms might be invited to tender for subjects in those schools unable to compete financially with the elite FTSE establishments. These would be solid enough performers and might get your child into a half-decent polytechnic and a career as an army specialist.

As well as league tables for exam results there would be something similar for teachers. This would operate like the draft system for US gridiron stars. Top schools would be prepared to pay huge salaries for teachers who can spin an A from a C- with the densest of materials.

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In terms of discipline, parents would be expected to sign a sort of educational pre-nup. This would effectively permit a school to discipline a child as they saw fit and indemnify teachers in the event of any physical or mental damage sustained by the child.

As with all pure market-driven industries the dross would be quietly discarded. Children whose parents were unable to afford even the most basic fees would be taken to educational ‘farms’ where they would be given basic instruction on physical fitness and mechanical and household maintenance. Each year in these places there would be a Hunger Games type of competition where the prize could be a free education at one of the top schools. Those firms with an authentic sense of social mission at their core would bestow scholarships for the children of factory workers with long and unblemished service records.

The overall effect achieved by such a system would be to ensure that power and wealth was retained within tight clusters of the right sort. Sounds ridiculous?

Well, in effect, it’s how Britain’s independent and fee-paying school system works. The essential alchemy at the heart of these places has little to do with achieving academic excellence and instilling lofty values. Bright pupils excelling at a fee-paying school would also have done so at a state establishment.

Let’s be honest here; their main attraction lies in masking the intellectual weaknesses of the less able offspring of rich families, thus sparing them having to work with common people who don’t just wear overalls for fishing. It also explains many of the catastrophic events in British military history; some decisions taken in the run-up to the banking crisis and the tenure of the Bush family and Donald Trump in the White House.

The results of a survey published this week found that more than a third of Edinburgh residents felt that a child’s social class had a material effect on their academic school performances. This compared with just 23% in Glasgow. The numbers are hardly surprising when you factor in how many children attend fee-paying schools in Edinburgh: currently around one in five and the highest percentage of such in the UK.

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I’m not entirely sure that this suggests Edinburgh people are more class-conscious than in Glasgow or somehow more snobbish in their attitudes. It’s simply confirmation of what most of us probably already knew: that if you want to gain influence and wealth in modern Britain it helps greatly if you attended one of these schools. It would be instructive if My Tutor, the online tutoring service which conducted the survey, undertook also to ask people to what extent they felt that a child’s natural ability affected academic performance. Perhaps this is too difficult to measure.

It certainly seems beyond the wit of any British or Scottish Government to attempt to do so. As things stand we assume that children born into challenging social circumstances must be of low academic ability. We judge them purely on exam results and fail to factor in the daily challenges of health inequality and multi-deprivation. We know that none can afford private tuition, the favourite means by which affluent but academically unremarkable children can tilt the playing field. The failure of British society to find more imaginative ways of unlocking the potential of poor children must cost this country billions every year in health and social security spending and crime prevention.

Perhaps then they could borrow on the notion of pure, market-driven schools and customise them to meet the needs of the many rather than the few. I’d grant major global firms as well as local companies a suite of incentives to provide direct funding of local authority schools in our most disadvantaged neighbourhoods. They would have no influence on educational policy. As part of the deal they would also provide employment opportunities for pupils in these schools.

Funding could range from meeting the salaries of extra teachers; providing resource materials and paying for overseas trips. They would meet the cost of tutors for bright children and grant them meaningful internships, currently the exclusive preserve of affluent pupils whose parents have good professional connections.

Boris Johnson talked about a process of “levelling up” to address regional inequalities in British society. I expect that to go the same way as Margaret Thatcher’s promise to bestow Franciscan kindness in 1979. The SNP Government has the power to make this a reality; all that is required to make it happen is the courage to try something different.