Who’d have thought it? The Department for Education and Ofsted are falling out over the importance attached to exams.

According to a leak to The Sunday Times, Ofsted is proposing to downgrade the use of exam results as a measure of school quality. A source within the inspectorate believes: “The culture of cramming children has to stop…schools where teachers just think about how you get exam results and not what is best for the children to learn will be marked down. The chief inspector wants to shift a culture that is betraying a generation.”

This momentous proposal for change emerges amid concern that this year’s A-level results will drop, and not because of harder new exams. It’s believed that the large rise in unconditional offers made by universities (some 20 per cent of all offers) has encouraged some applicants to take their foot off the pedal, and thus miss those top grades.

One might wonder where the harm is in that. When reports emerged in January of the rise in unconditional offers, I wrote in favour of the development: anything that reduces the horrendous pressure on young people is a good move, in my view. By contrast, powerful voices were raised condemning the trend.

A levels are all about winning university places: if they’re won, why should we worry about the number of top grades achieved nationally? To be sure, A levels will appear on a person’s CV for the rest of their life, but will the difference between an A* and an A, or even a B, have significant impact for anyone after the age of 20? I doubt it.

The DfE, obsessed by exam results, is seemingly unsettled by Ofsted’s apparent conversion. Its spokes-robot (a variant of sophisticated AI, but with the intelligence omitted), claimed Ofsted had no need to move its goalposts: “a broad, balanced and grounded education” is required for all children, and “the Ofsted inspection framework already requires schools to demonstrate this”.

All very liberal, but don’t miss the weasel words: “exams and assessments have always been one of several measures to judge schools’ performance and this will continue”.

For sure, it will. The DfE wants results to rise year-on-year. Until, that is, some miserable secretary of state decides too many top grades are being awarded and exams have been dumbed down: witness the new grading system at GCSE where the top grade is 9, leaving scope for further grades to be added.

The DfE has finally come clean: exams are about measuring and pushing schools. Moreover, “our exams are on a par with the world’s best education systems”. There you have it. Exam results, and above all performance tables, have little to do with individual attainment and everything to do with measuring and putting pressure on schools, not least so the government can boast that its schools are doing as well as the rest of the world (if not better).

Set against that backdrop, to see Ofsted championing a broad and rich education, and refusing to let that aim be sacrificed on the altar of exam grades, is little short of astonishing. To be fair, Amanda Spielman made no secret of her intent when she took over as HMCI.

Will the artistic and creative subjects, so dangerously marginalised by recent pressures, therefore see a new lease of life? Some commentators think/hope so. I reckon the jury’s out. Moreover, will Ofsted’s desire to take a broader, qualitative view create still more work for schools and teachers required to produce evidence? That’s certainly a risk, on past form.

Exams should be about young people striving and excelling, to be sure, but not at any cost. Let’s take pleasure in seeing our students get where they need to go, rather than obsessing about the grades they achieve, or about where our schools sit in the league tables.

Meanwhile, we can sit back and watch the fun as the DfE and the inspectorate slug it out.

Dr Bernard Trafford is a writer, educationalist and musician. He is a former headteacher of the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, and past chair of HMC. He is currently interim headteacher of the Purcell School in Hertfordshire. He tweets @bernardtrafford