Whatever happened to brightest and best?

Labour wrecked the university system we had in this country and generally have been a negating factor in education from without and within via the leftist leaning unions with their 'all must win' philosophies and emphasis on dragging all down to the lowest common denominator. They've even used left leaning think tanks to undermine the education system and make suggestions which frankly do not make sense if we wish our schools and universities to produce the best in educated pupils and scholars.
Telegraph.

Universities should drop their entry requirements for pupils from state comprehensives to prevent them missing out on sought-after degree courses, according to research published by the Department for Education.
Teenagers should be admitted to university with lower grades than peers from the private sector to close the gap between state and fee-paying schools, it was claimed.
The study, by the Institute for Fiscal Studies and Warwick University, said performance in GCSEs had the biggest bearing on pupils’ chances of gaining good A-levels and getting in to top universities.
Millions of pounds spent by universities each year to “widen participation” in higher education should be focused on pupils aged 14-to-16 to push them towards degree courses, it said.
But the research warned that the sheer gulf in standards between comprehensives and academically-selective state or private schools was so vast that more drastic measures were needed.

So rather than tackle the real problem of failing state schools the leftard solution is to reduce the entry requirements for failing schools at top universities.
Truly idiotic is it not?
It does not seem to have occurred to anyone making this report (or perhaps it has and it's all part of the plan) that allowing more poorly educated pupils into university doesn't help them, the university, nor the ones who've really earned a place there. If you go in with a lower standard you've got to be brought up to the required standard for one thing and so several will find themselves dropping out because they cannot cope with the far more rigorous requirements that universities need in order to get a degree in a subject that actually means something.
Education has been wrecked by the so called progressives in this country who demanded an everyone wins formulae to make the system look like year on year things were getting better despite the obvious reality that things weren't and we were producing an underclass to whom reading and basic maths was a foreign concept. It was then taken further to try and force higher education to expand and take on pupils who were manifestly ill equipped to cope with the rigours required in studying at that level.
So now we come to another biggie, lower your standards to let the ill educated in so all can win prizes...
You'd struggle to make it up wouldn't you?