As an English teacher, I know all about context. I have little lists of handy facts that can be inserted to get the marks for each of the texts in the GCSE and A level syllabuses. My classes are drilled to know that while An Inspector Calls was written in 1945 (end of a world war) it is set in 1912 (just before a world war).

And while I can get frustrated at the need to go over and over the same things, I do fundamentally believe that you cannot understand a text without context.

So what about the context in which our students sit their exams?

There is a hard, uncomfortable fact in the world of education that refuses to go away. If you are poor you do less well. Not because poverty robs you of brainpower – but because the stresses and traumas of poverty interrupt and distract from the process of passing exams. And, unfortunately, all attempts to fix this are doomed to fail because of the basic, intuitive truth – our system is designed to work in tandem with home, not separately from it.

Let me explain what I mean. Even on the simple level of timing, school is designed around an assumption that there is someone at home to drop off at 8.45 and pick up at 3. No job – ironically, not even teaching – fits with this. But what happens in school is in partnership with home as well. In the early years, homework is essentially structured time between parents and children. Reading strategies are dependent on reading at home. And when you get to Secondary level, and you start moving towards exams, the very nature and volume of assessment is designed to reward revision outside school hours.

So when home is disrupted, or when parents are struggling with money, working three jobs, or having to negotiate around incompatible shift structures – or when relatives are ill, marriages break down, houses are repossessed – schoolwork suffers.

Of course it does.

The thing is, at the same time, we have an educational narrative which tells us we’re on a level playing field. All we have to do is work hard and opportunity is there for the taking. Those who do well deserve it – and those who don’t, don’t.

And the educational opportunity represented by that academic success is presented primarily as an economic opportunity. We persuade kids to buy into education by reducing it to an equation that says school exists for the purpose of grades, and grades translate into income in later life.

Kids know this. Every time I ask, ‘what’s the point of school?’, I get an answer that varies between ‘to get good grades’ and ‘to get a good job’. And they also know that the odds are stacked against the poorest of them – creating a toxic mix of stress and apathy that can further hold back achievement in our most disadvantaged cohorts.

But we can’t fix this with the simplistic idea that we just need to ditch exams. Exams are not our problem. Exams are just an educational tool – and quite a good one at that. It is the context in which exams are sat that is damaging. The high stakes, the narrow valuing of some knowledge over other knowledge, the one-shot structure where everything comes down to a few intense weeks.

And the belief that a grade genuinely represents an accurate measure of absolute capacity.

That context around exams distorts education. It changes my teaching of An Inspector Calls from an exercise in thought and growth into an exercise in ticking boxes. It isn’t the exam that does that. Rather it is the way the grade the exam produces is used to sort and rank young people.

So what’s the alternative?

It certainly isn’t to turn the clock back. We’ve had decades of progress in many areas of education – in pedagogy, in the knowledge rich curriculum, in driving up standards. But we’ve also allowed ourselves to believe two fundamental errors.

1 – that, judged purely in terms of exam results, the system can be ‘fair’ so long as schools and kids just work harder.

2 – that education is primarily understood in terms of the economic gain to society.

As we see what the new curriculum review has to offer over the next few months, we need to be very careful of that second error in particular. Because it has crept into every aspect of our discourse, amongst people who have vastly different educational philosophies.

Again and again phrases like ‘skills for the workplace’ and the ‘graduate premium’ tell us that we should think of education in terms of the money that it will eventually produce. They encourage the marketisation of education, the pitting of institutions against each other and of students against each other.

Really, if we are to truly rethink education, and make it something for all students, regardless of background or ability, we need to think of school as a public good – and of the curriculum as something that is more than just fuel for the workplace. The knowledge we provide should be something that forges all students into citizens, making them deep-thinking, empathic, careful, and engaged.

To do that, we have to start thinking of school not just as factory that has an output – but as a home, in which students live, grow, and find a sense of belonging in the society that nurtures them.

Sammy Wright’s new book Exam Nation, Why Our Obsession with Grades Fails Everyone – and a Better Way to Think About School is published today.