On the third point, the central services that benefit from the money put away include pupil referral units. This is the year that the Government has told local education authorities for the first time that every excluded child must have a full-time education. The fact that 19 town halls have not passed on all the cash for education masks the fact that 131 have – and they have spent £100m more on education than the Government wanted them to. Only on the last point – the diversion of £23m of revenue to capital spending – may there be some merit but £23m is not going to solve the shortfall anyway.After Friday’s offensive against the local authorities, it was good to hear Stephen Twigg, the schools minister, adopt a more emollient tone when addressing the National Association of Head Teachers on Sunday. He said the three partners – the Department for Education and Skills, the LEAs and the teachers’ organisations – would have to work together to solve any problems. However, there is a fourth partner who will have to enter that equation – and that is Gordon Brown, the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

We believe that the time has come to dip into Treasury coffers to bail out some of the worst affected schools who are suffering shortfalls of up to £750,000 this year.. Independent-school head teachers have called off their boycott of Bristol, the university that was accused of discriminating in its admissions procedures. I welcome this, though I doubt whether Bristol was behaving so differently from anywhere else. Their public-relations handling of the affair may have been dire, but did they really deliberately refuse places to talented independent- school applicants in favour of less qualified people? Somehow, I doubt it.
What the Bristol saga exposes is the mess that institutions of higher education are in when it comes to admissions. It also shows how strongly people feel about this: until war in Iraq swept lurid tales of unfair admissions procedures and government social-engineering off the front pages, newspapers had written about little else for weeks. We saw “scientific” evidence ( that weasel phrase!) “proving” that students with lower A-level results did better than those trained to pass exams.

We had statistics showing that students with lower entry qualifications were more likely to drop out. We had those who advocate the American SAT tests urging their immediate adoption; we had psychometric tests offered as a panacea; we had state schools presented as dismal holes, their pupils doomed, and independents shown as hothouse crammers.A historian of the media will look back on the reporting of the whole business of how universities admitted students in 2002-03 and see that this was obviously training for the reporting of the war that followed: endless speculation, claims of “truthful” accounts from the front line, and a mass of obfuscation, myths, half-truths and downright lies.The reality is that there is no simple, transparently fair way of processing applications to university in this age of mass higher education. The university admissions system was designed to incorporate several factors, not just exam results, via a personal statement from every applicant and a reference from the school. In this way, it was felt that the academic would be offset by the personal and a third-party comment. It seems to be one of the fairest systems, in principle, that I’ve ever seen – much fairer than some operating elsewhere in the world But there are market forces to consider.