“Imagine that you make turbines for jet engines. Imagine that you have a 2 per cent failure rate for your finished product. Suppose that each of your products costs £3,000 and takes 600 hours to produce. Imagine that you produce one million a year. Your 2 per cent failure rate costs you £60 million a year and 12 million hours of people’s time. Then imagine that your below-standard turbines are actually fitted to jet engines that go into service. Extraordinarily, this is equivalent to the waste produced by our A level system every year. A million qualifications taken, about £3,000 spent on each one over two years and 2 per cent failed. Yet every year the call is not for lower wastage and less failure but for more.”