One should not blame the fee-charging schools for their attempts to scupper the development of a fair system of university entry. They are in business. Their selling point is that they get the children of the well-heeled middle classes into posh universities, such as Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol and Imperial College. Remove this advantage, and most of the incentives for parents to pay fees disappear. Private schools would be in grave peril. Britain would have a real chance of becoming a country where nearly all children attended the same type of school, to the great benefit of both society and the economy. This is why the government's policy of broadening access to university is so important - new Labour will be forgiven many things if it can crack this one.

Privilege, when challenged, defends itself fiercely. There is no sight so fearsome as the British elite organising to defend their advantages; firefighters and railway workers are timid prevaricators by comparison. Fee-charging schools account for 20 per cent of sixth-formers (and under 8 per cent of all school pupils), but 40 per cent of the entrants to Bristol. That is lower than five years ago, but Bristol is now trying to increase the number of entrants from comprehensives still further. The Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, the public school trade union, has blown its whistle and shouted: "Everybody out!" Its members will boycott Bristol. Its lawyers will consider court action. Its lobbyists have persuaded the Prime Minister to express disapproval in the House of Commons. Its slick PR machine has whipped up a media frenzy. Andy Gilchrist and Bob Crow must be gasping in envy and admiration.

Like all universities, Bristol receives public funds. Higher education is the only public service (unless you count the prisons) for which the mass of the population is required to pay but from which its own children are more likely than not to be excluded. A red-blooded socialist might well argue that, on grounds of social justice, admissions policies should be biased towards the disadvantaged, and universities used as instruments of redistribution.

But that is not what Bristol is doing. Accusations that it is guilty of striving for social justice (or social engineering, as the critics contentiously call it) are simply untrue. Bristol is merely refining - as all universities should have done years ago - its methods of unearthing the best talent. Those who denounce a university for turning away applicants with the best A-levels assume that A-level grades are infallible predictors of performance on degree courses, that a student with AAA will always do better than one with ABB. Work by Robin Naylor and Jeremy Smith at Warwick University's department of economics shows how wrong they are.

The two men looked at the records of all students who left UK universities in 1992-93. They found that a male student who had attended a fee-charging school was 6.5 per cent less likely to get a good degree (First or Upper Second) than a student with the same A-level grades who had attended a local authority school. The equivalent figure for female students was 5.4 per cent. Moreover, the higher the fees charged by the school, the less likely the student was to get a good degree compared with others who had the same pre-entry grades.

In other words, fee-charging schools coach young people into getting A-level grades beyond their natural abilities, and those that charge the highest fees do this most effectively. This is hardly surprising: it is how one would expect a market to work; it is what parents are paying for. The fee-charging schools have smaller classes, better books and equipment, and probably better teachers; and the bigger the fees, the more such advantages their pupils enjoy. Further, selection of entrants, both initially and at sixth-form level, allows them to focus intensively on passing academic exams (you can call it cramming if you want to be as rude about them as their defenders are about comprehensives). The surprise is not that their pupils overachieve, but that they do not overachieve more. Yet the effect does not apparently last to the end of a university course; it is a short-term one.

Hence, without reference to social justice or equality, but simply on grounds of hard-nosed efficiency, Bristol is entirely justified in rejecting private school pupils with AAA grades (they are even less likely to get good degrees if they have four-plus A-levels) in favour of state school pupils with ABB grades. And ministers are justified in pressing other universities to follow similar policies, with financial penalties for those that don't. The new approach to admissions is neither unfair nor discriminatory - the old approach was both.

Andy Gilchrist, business hero

As Robert Taylor reports on page 27, these are difficult times for union leaders, who see Tony Blair only twice a year. They feel he prefers the business lobby. It is in this light that we must judge the bill of £817.21 (including four bottles of Chateau Chasse-Spleen at £85 each) incurred by Andy Gilchrist at a smart Indian restaurant in Westminster. A few months ago, Mr Gilchrist, the Fire Brigades Union leader, was hailed as a working-class hero because he had actually organised a strike and even picket lines. Much good it did him; the outcome may be lost jobs. Mr Gilchrist is wise to become a business hero, consuming conspicuously at other people's expense. Turn his union into a private contractor, rename it something like FireAction, announce flexible, dynamic intentions, send inflated bills to the government, and his transformation will be complete. He can then expect regular invitations to Downing Street.

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