Here’s an unlikely sentence: in 2012, Michael Gove was right about something. I say this as a former teacher who, at the time, was dealing with his terrible ideas on a daily basis. But, if he’d managed to pull it off, the faff over GCSE results this week would have been very different.

On Thursday more than half a million children got their GCSE results. That’s the equivalent of every person in Sheffield receiving an envelope one morning telling them if they are a “pass” or a “fail”. That may sound harsh, but under the new regime, introduced last week, children are split into “strong” passers, “standard” passers and a group of children with such low grades that politicians dare not speak about them in public, but presumably call them “sub-standard” in their internal emails.

In Wales and Northern Ireland, there was less change as exam boards in those countries stuck to the old format because of major concerns about what the English were up to. (Scotland, as ever, ignored the whole thing and carried on with its own system). Hence, not only are grades more difficult to compare across year groups, it’s also hard to compare children in each country.

It was not supposed to be like this. If all had gone to Gove’s original plan, most children would have received grades for taking whiz-bang “more rigorous” exams, while some children would have received grades for a smaller version of the GCSE – maybe called a GCSE “half-certificate”.

Unfortunately, all did not go to plan. What happened?

Let’s rewind. Back in 2012, Gove was concerned by a problem that most politicians wilfully ignore. Every year a small percentage of children gain nothing more than a handful of E-G grades. These are pretty useless for moving on to college, jobs or apprenticeships (most want D grades as a minimum). Schools can predict who these children are, even before they start their GCSE course at age 14. The guesses are not always bang on, and schools avoid telling children that they are expected to do badly, but if you ask a headteacher to be brutally honest, they can point you to these kids with alarming accuracy.

At the other end of the spectrum, a lot of children were getting top grades, making it difficult for universities or employers to pick off the most talented. This was not unexpected. Over time, generations get gradually smarter, under a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. Although the government added the A* grade in the 1990s, by 2012 the proportion of children getting A or A* had hit 20% in some subjects.

Hence, Gove’s not-stupid idea was to make GCSEs a bit harder for most kids: add an extra grade at the top (a sort of A**), while giving children at the bottom an alternative exam. Instead of bamboozling an E-grade pupil by dragging them through the entire maths GCSE curriculum, teachers would teach half the content to a low-attaining child so they could understand it at a deeper level, which was more akin to what standard employers wanted.

The man who battered teachers into submission on other reforms rolled over on his plans for the children who struggled

So far, so credible. And then, the Daily Mail happened. “Return of the O-level: Gove plans to scrap dumbed-down GCSEs”, screamed the front page one sunny day in June. Immediately, the Liberal Democrats went into incensed overdrive. Because it was 2012, this mattered. Nick Clegg sprung up on telly, saying he would block the change. No one wanted a return to the days when bright kids could access one type of exam and froze out the others, he said. A fair point, but not what was actually being suggested. Still, a battle ensued, and Gove’s idea – which spiralled into something remarkably odd over the coming months – was on the ropes.

By 2013 Gove gave up. He stood in parliament and sheepishly told MPs his two-tier plan was “a bridge too far”. The man who battered teachers into submission on other reforms rolled over on his plans for the children who most struggled.

Despite all this, Gove quietly forged ahead with his favourite bits of the plan. And so, on Thursday, children received grades for newly-reformed GCSEs. Most noticeably, numerical grades (9 to 1) replaced lettered ones (A* to G) in English and maths. All subjects will gradually change over the next two years.

The magical 9 grade appeared for the first time, reserved for only the super-smartest kids. What children must know for the new exams is deeper, harder and more rigorous. All the things that Gove promised for the brightest, yet none of the changes for the rest. Even worse, there has been a fudge over changes to the middle grades. Subsequent education secretaries were caught out by the political difficulty of implementing harder exams.

In a bid to stop anyone from noticing if loads of kids did worse, Nicky Morgan announced that the 5 grade – which is incomparable to any past performance measures – was to become the new “standard” at which pupils passed GCSEs. Colleges and universities dutifully started raising their admissions policies, only to realise that if they all did so, 150,000 children who had previously got Cs, and so could be let into their doors, would now get 4s and be disbarred from entry. In order to avoid this problem, Justine Greening started telling employers and universities to keep accepting 4 grades as a pass mark. She told everyone: Don’t worry, a 4 is a “standard pass”, while a 5 is a “strong pass”.

But what did that mean? No one really knew! (They still don’t).

Meanwhile, she made no mention of the pesky children receiving a 3 grade or below, and what the new grades meant for them.

Hence, on Thursday morning more than half a million children received an envelope containing a series of numbers or letters that told them whether they had “passed” or “failed” their new GCSEs. For the super-brightest, there was pride in getting a 9 grade. Just 2,000 children got the top grade in each of their core subjects. For elite universities, the job of picking out the crème-de-la-crème just got easier.

But what did five years of turmoil – of lesson-planning, teacher-training time, new textbooks and hours of extra revision – do for the kids most in need? Very little. If your child got a 4 grade, there is uncertainty about their ability to get a job or go to university. For the kid who got below a 4, life is no different at all. We switched their E grade for a 3 grade, and that’s it.

Hundreds of thousands of man-hours and pounds to make life easier for a few Oxbridge dons. For everyone else, a bridge too far, meant struggling kids received no bridge at all.