The exams grade scandal leaves us wondering how pupils will ever feel they can trust the system

The U-turn on A-level and GCSE grades comes after a weekend of sheer misery and needless anxiety for tens of thousands of students and their families.

The Prime Minister and his Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson, have belatedly done the right thing.

But it leaves us wondering how pupils will ever feel they can trust the system again.

With schools facing a daunting battle to reopen next month, it’s hard to imagine how anything could be more demotivating than the farce of the past few days.

I expect every family in the country must know at least one student whose life has been affected by the arbitrary allocation of low exam grades.

My wife Margaret and I know four such young people. All have worked hard for years, yet their dedication apparently counted for nothing. One had a predicted B grade reassessed as a U (Unclassified) on the basis (one can only suppose) that students from that school had a distribution of grades in previous years translated to the present day.

It’s hard to imagine anything more unfair. Of course, the outcomes that created this chaos would not have been planned deliberately.

The failure belongs to the people that designed the software, and those instructing them to avoid grade inflation at all costs – not the pupils who were punished.

Yesterday’s U-turn does not solve everything. Universities will have to cope with an influx of students who now have the grades for places at their first choice. That will cascade down through the system. It could have an impact on the jobs market too, as A-level students disillusioned with education decide to look for employment instead.

There are precious few jobs available at the moment, and the last thing we need is to see more school leavers entering the arena.

What is remarkable, and I have to admit I did not believe this was possible, is that the Government has managed to upset people from every socio-economic background.

It’s not only the comprehensives and the academies but the Government’s own flagship ‘free schools’ and grammar schools that have suffered egregious injustice. The head of one grammar school told BBC Radio Four’s Today programme that their results were 10 per cent worse than they had ever received in the history of the school.

To alienate the nation across the board is quite a political achievement. This Government has reset the bar for incompetence.

I have to say I feel some grudging sympathy for Gavin Williamson.

It isn’t just that he’s so manifestly out of his depth and floundering. I feel sorry that he lacks the most important weapon in any minister’s arsenal – the steadfast backing of a competent PM.

When I was secretary of state for education and employment, I was able to take difficult decisions and implement them because I knew I had the full support of my Prime Minister and my department. Without that, I would have had a much tougher time.

Now I see infighting and internal arguments wreaking havoc in the education department, with no strong leadership to sort them out. It’s a truly torrid situation.

Confidence must be restored as an absolute priority, starting with a competent handling of a full return of pupils to education in two weeks’ time.

And maximum support must be given to the universities, which are now facing pandem-onium. Just 24 hours ago, sorting out this crisis was the respons- ibility of Ofqual, who were about to be overwhelmed by appeals. The fallout was critical for schools too.

Now suddenly, it is the university network that must process a vast number of applications from students whose grades are ricocheting around.

It doesn’t take a psychic to predict more chaos.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, of course – but how easily this could have been avoided, by simply trusting the teachers in the first place.

Lord Blunkett was Secretary of State for Education and Employment from 1997 to 2001.