Mixed weather forecasts, ranging from extreme heat and drought to torrential rain and potential flooding; the reappearance of the UK’s unique contribution to high fashion - the socks and sandals combo; the Edinburgh festival season which has recently become an almost completely unaffordable and ugly behemoth for those referred to as “ordinary people” by television and theatre producers who stalk the city for three weeks a year; and perhaps one of the strangest and, for me, disconcerting features of the summer - the annual parading of school pupils across all types of media as they are about to receive their exam results.

In my recent memory, this has developed into a regular slot on television news programmes, radio broadcasts, and a major splash across newspapers. Almost invariably, and I’m willing to be proved wrong here, the children who are subjected to this seem to be pre-selected by the schools involved and almost always happen to be the pupils who have achieved the high grades that they either thought they would get, and/or which will be enough to send them off to the universities of their choice. We see them either shrieking with delight (the children who have also managed to retain a sense of wonder and surprise at their hard work paying off), or those who simply shrug their shoulders in a “well, obviously I expected to get three ‘A’s in my advanced highers” manner (the not-so-nice children who would be shrieking with ill-disguised rage and disgust if they got anything less).

Again, more often than not, the pupils and teachers will appear alongside a local councillor or politician who sits on an education committee and who beams that while this is of course, all down to the pupils hard work, also insists that their party’s policy on education, equality and attainment have also had a major role to play. Ok. There doesn’t really seem to be anything to gripe about here. Young people working hard to achieve success in exams? Fine. Schools and politicians taking plaudits for helping them achieve those successes? No surprise there. But there is always something in this annual scenario which makes me furious.

What about the young people who have worked just as hard and who haven’t managed to achieve the success that they were also dreaming of? What are the schools and the politicians doing about the potential circumstances which led to their dreams being dashed? What about young people who have to study in classrooms which are falling to pieces, who have to share textbooks due to insufficient funding, and who may be turning up at school hungry which affects their ability to study properly in the first place?

Make no mistake, there are children who are just as clever, just as determined, and just as ambitious as their contemporaries who have achieved success, but the very real social and economic challenges which these children face have a direct and significant impact on their education and their journey through a system which, by design, fails them year after year.

We have fallen into a desperately depressing educational abyss in which it appears to be the case that if you don’t get the required exam results to get into university, then you are somehow regarded as a failure. Parents push children, politicians push teachers, and children push themselves into all kinds of relentless anxiety for years in order to fulfill some misguided societal “norm” that university is an essential step on your life’s journey. It’s an outdated attitude that’s not only stressing thousands of children and parents, but one that is holding us back as a nation.

What’s more important? That we focus on those who are lucky enough to have all the right tools and support systems in place with which to pass exams and achieve their ambitions? Or to shift our focus onto those who absolutely need more support and perhaps different tools and avenues to make their way in life? It’s time that we realised that equality means recognising that everyone has a real contribution to make whatever their talent happens to be, and that passing exams and going to university is not the ultimate goal. We’re crying out for young people to also view trades as successful routes through life; joiners, plumbers, plasterers, etc. And we need to place as much importance on these vocational skills as other academic subjects.

Maybe in future end of term broadcasts we’ll see children reading their poetry alongside their mates who want to be skilled trades people, alongside their mates who want to be doctors, alongside their beaming teachers and politicians, with everyone of them viewed as essential to the nation’s well-being.

Now that would be a success.