[smcl]

The funny thing is that this entrance exam to Eton is effectively their ticket to the top, once you're there you're on easy street. Boris Johnson attended Eton, didn't achieve particularly good results but cruised into a scholarship at Oxford. I attended a decent state school and had a fellow student who had literally top grades in all the exams he'd taken (eight "1"s at Standard Grade, five "A"s at higher, five "A"s at Advanced Higher) and his application to Oxford was touch-and-go. Now, such grades do not guarantee anyone a place at Oxford as there is a lot of competition, but you can be sure that if he had two English A-levels at grade B or C[0] he wouldn't even have been considered. The application would go instantly to the bin.

This is not true of Eton (or I guess Harrow or the other public schools).

[0] - Or whatever Boris Johnson got, I can't recall exactly, they were spectacularly subpar but he's masterfully scrubbed them from the internet