Had it not been for the pandemic, I would have been one of the hundreds of thousands of students sitting their A-levels this summer. In my case, that would have meant spending a good part of the year frantically preparing essays on subjects in order to fulfil my university offer.

As it happened, individual effort had only a small part in producing grades that would determine our futures. Three of my close friends who missed their offers were at the mercy not of an exam, or of teachers who knew them, but of a flawed algorithm. No amount of work, it transpired, could have prevented the A* that my friend received in his Economics mock from becoming the C that would deprive him of his chosen course.

I had the benefit of a grammar school education, which meant that randomness of the grade allocations were made up for me by my school’s academic record. For 18-year-olds who didn’t have this benefit up and down the country, it was precisely this record that failed them. The powerful always expect less of working-class students. But in the exceptional circumstances, there was no chance to see their self-fulfilling prejudices confirmed by public exams. 

Nor could they claim those who succeed against the odds as ‘evidence that the system worked.’ If they wanted to ensure continuity with previous years, they had to reproduce the same inequalities. In doing so, they condemned many of my friends to an unjust fate they couldn’t have escaped for all the work in the world.

We are used to being told that with the right mix of talent and hard work, anyone can get anywhere. It is a sort of ‘golden promise’ that lies at the core of the capitalist system, and it has always been an illusion. But on Thursday, the government dropped the pretences. They were saying the quiet bit out loud: that Britain is far from a meritocracy.

When your government stands between you and your future, you fight your government. The exams fiasco was far from the only reason young people had for resisting, but it proved the catalyst for many people. I have friends who have spent years trying to avoid politics only to realise that politics is personal. With their immediate futures at stake, and feeling otherwise utterly powerless, young people got their placards and headed to town centres.

Gavin Williamson’s u-turn owes much to the intensity of the backlash from these protests, from the outcry from parents and teachers, and to the immediacy of the problem – most university terms begin in a matter of weeks.

Once the sense of relief subsides among those who missed their grades, young people should be clear about the lesson of this fiasco: protest works. The charge sheet against the government extends far beyond inequalities in education. Given how powerless we feel in the face of precarious work, an inaccessible housing market and an all-encompassing climate crisis whose worse consequences we have a decade left to avert, a victory is what we needed. Against a government ready to sacrifice our future, we should be ready and willing to take back power.

It is no surprise that some of those responsible for the protests against the algorithm are the same people who organised student climate marches and Black Lives Matter protests. The largest protest movements of recent years are attended overwhelmingly by the young. They are becoming our only outlets of defiance against an establishment that has seen fit to abandon our generation.

But we need more than just a disparate movement. Although Keir Starmer’s intervention on the algorithm was welcome, the Labour Party needs to do more to offer young people an alternative to the parallel crises that threaten our future. Starmer promised during his leadership campaign that ‘another future is possible’. It is time that he tells us what that future is, and how we can fight for it. 

When I studied John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath at school, it taught me more than anything that a failure to protect people against condemnation and misery will produce massive discontent. If Labour and the left fails to offer young people a proper alternative to the bleak future confronting my generation, somebody else will capitalise on it. We have won an important battle, but to secure a decent future, we still need to win a war.