The Sutton Trust has long backed the use of additional tests, such as US-style Scholastic Aptitude Tests (SATs), as a means of assessing students for university places.
 
So when research it part-commissioned concludes that SATs are actually no better than A-levels and GCSEs for predicting degree results, what does it do? It produces a press release that puts this very interesting conclusion down in paragraph three.
 
From the trust’s website, you would think the research was designed to measure something else entirely. “Comprehensive pupils outperform independent and grammar pupils in university degrees” it says. A pupil from a comp with the same A-levels as a pupil from a private or grammar school is likely to get a better degree.
 
What this tells us is that comprehensive schools are failing to make the best of their pupils, which is unlikely to surprise anybody. Their failure to get A-level results appropriate to the talents of their pupils was exactly why the Sutton Trust thought it worthwhile to commission the study into SATs, carried out by the National Foundation for Educational Research.
 
It hoped, no doubt, that SATs would reveal hidden talents that A-levels and GCSEs miss, and show the whole system was biased against the comprehensive schools. But they don’t.