This autumn, Cambridge University will admit 200 more state-school pupils than last year. Before we get too excited about this great leap forward for meritocracy, listen to a Cambridge admissions tutor I know. Nick says he stayed up all night re-reading applications. He was trying to find a single state-school student who could compare with candidates from the private system. "If I found one that was halfway OK, there was always a story behind it," he sighs. "The parents were headteachers or the school was a grammar. A bright working-class kid from a bog-standard comp isn't educated enough to stand a chance."

I have been thinking a lot about fairness and Oxbridge since my husband found some old reports from his public school. Reading the salty comments was a hoot for this comprehensive girl until we got to the report for Anthony's Oxbridge term. I counted at least three learned Latin masters, the same number of dedicated French teachers and four English experts before I started to cry.

Strange how dismaying it was, more than a quarter of a century after taking the Cambridge exam, to discover exactly what I had been up against. I was like a wobbly child on a second-hand Raleigh 20 in a race with the British Olympic cycling team. My husband had a crack band of Oxbridge-educated masters analysing every weakness in his performance. I had well-meaning teachers who loaned me the university prospectus. He had gaps in his knowledge. I had pitiful spots of knowledge in my gaps. I bet I was the only Oxbridge candidate to scrape in that year who wrote a Dickens essay based on my unrivalled knowledge of Lionel Bart's musical, Oliver!