In Britain, nothing gets a teacher’s blood up faster than suggesting, as the UK press does every August, that the “gold standard” A Level has been devalued. Not on your nelly: teachers and pupils work harder, they’re better prepared and more focused on the curriculum, and hence standards have risen - is the usual response. But universities continue to complain that entrants just aren’t up to scratch.

It’s a complaint also heard here in Barcelona. Some hard facts show how badly what used to be called COU and now batxillerat (sixth form) schooling prepares kids for the demands of university study: 28% of undergraduates never finish their degree (a shocking 40% in hard science) and 74% fail to pass their degree within the standard course length (degrees in technical subjects are commonly spun out to seven years and longer).

There are clear reasons for this beside low secondary school standards. The grant system is paltry so poorer students mix jobs with study, and because undergrads generally live at home, there’s less pressure to finish within four years. The course unit structure of most Spanish degrees means students can selectively revise and resit units until they pass, so there’s no hurry, especially as graduates are unlikely to find work quickly. Add to this the genteel and trendy status of studentdom for the broad middle class and you have a formula for mediocrity - not to mention the mediocrity of much of Spain’s closed-shop university staffing.

But the main reason why standards are low lies in secondary schooling and the imbalance between public and private school funding. Indulge me for a minute while I explain why this opinion isn’t sentimental pinko prejudice.

While many concertada (grant-aided) schools do a good job in patching over gaps in local state school coverage, too many of them are charm schools whose heads are in thrall to powerful parents and whose teachers are wary of offending pupils by using strong discipline and awarding low grades when appropriate.

The school-leaver selectivitat exam results published this month show private schools outperforming public schools by a widening extent - 92.9% of private school students passed compared to 88.5% in state schools, and with higher average grades. Some of this is down to catchment, where private schools can be picky about family backgrounds, but certainly isn’t about teaching standards: private school teachers are not required to go through the oposiciones teacher training and selection process used in the state sector, so many of them are amateurish child-minders rather than professionals with an educational vocation.

The higher grades achieved by private school pupils are in the main down to the fact that the majority of the marks for selectivitat are not from impartial, externally moderated exams, but from coursework marks, for which the pupils will cajole, weep, recriminate and charm. State school teachers may be susceptible, but private school teachers are much more so: parents’ lobbying has got tough teachers sacked from upmarket private schools, though I’ll name no names. This anecdotal scandal of coursework grade inflation at private schools was confirmed by a group of worried university rectors during the preparation of the Bricall Report five years ago, and the situation has worsened, as coursework marks have increased their weighting in selectivitat since then.

Net result: large numbers of university places go to unfairly subsidised children from rich families who are significantly less able than their poorer peers.

Public funding for private schools was a great vote-winner for the conservative CiU government, who upped handouts to private schools by 61% between 1994 and 2000. This was often done in contravention of Generalitat rules, which require private schools to offer basic schooling free. The way round this is to describe fees as “donations” to the school’s foundation, commonly a religious organisation. When CiU’s Artur Mas was asked about these funding abuses, his glib response was that “there’s money left over” (unspoken: so I’ll subsidise my well-off supporters). In one of my encounters with Jordi Pujol he dodged my question about the illegality of the funding with the reply that it was his policy to give generous support to the private sector both in education and health (another story, the Salut scams, shortly to be told).

The PSC-ERC-ICV coalition now in power quickly ditched their manifesto promises and good intentions and, after growling that they’d cut funding to single-sex private schools (a sideswipe at pernicious religious sect interests, especially Opus Dei), kept right on with the same favouritism shown by CiU to the private sector. Grants to private schools have increased by 36% under the coalition while public sector schools see funding levels languishing at less than half the EU average as a proportion of GDP. There is no better illustration that the supposedly progressive coalition is scared to a bowel-emptying degree of upsetting the poderes facticos which really call the shots in Catalonia.