THERE is what the Scottish Government says, and there is what the Scottish Government does, and if there is one policy that exposes the difference between the two more than any other, it is free tuition fees. The SNP says free fees protect the principle that university education should be based on the ability to learn and not the ability to pay. But what the SNP does in reality is cut student grants for the poorest (by £35m) and refuse to acknowledge the evidence that rather than reducing inequality, free tuition fees actually helps to entrench it.

There are other reasons to dislike the free fees policy, not least the fact that the policy discriminates against students in the rest of the UK by making them pay when Scottish students do not have to. But the policy’s greatest weakness is the fact that it achieves the opposite of what it says it does by disproportionately benefiting those from better-off backgrounds. Just like the council tax freeze does. And free prescriptions. And free bus travel. And winter fuel payments.

The latest to make the argument is The Law Society of Scotland, which in a report pitched at all the parties ahead of the Holyrood elections in May, says that the free tuition policy has contributed to what it calls a resource transfer from low-income to high-income households. It also points out that the government is doing this at a time when access to university for the poorest is already pitiful in Scotland – much worse in fact than it is anywhere else in the UK.

The Law Society’s assessment of the situation is simple: there is a finite amount of money in the pot and at the moment much of that is being spent on funding students whose families could afford to pay. What should happen instead, say the lawyers, is that the available money should be focused on grants to the poorest students. In other words, the distribution of resources should be based on need.

This is, after all, how it used to work. For example, when I studied law at Aberdeen in the 1980s, there were grants for students who needed them and other students had to rely on parental contributions. This seems to me like an equitable way to do things: if you can afford it, you should pay for your education so that state funds can be concentrated on those who cannot pay.

The same should apply to tuition fees and a consensus is emerging on the subject, apart from among the worst of the SNP apologists. Recently, I spent some time with Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski, the principal of Robert Gordon University, and we talked among other things about tuition fees (and remember that the professor voted yes in the referendum and was appointed by the SNP to review higher education so there’s no anti-SNP agenda at work).

As far as I could see, the professor’s views on fees boiled down to the same problems and principles identified by the Law Society of Scotland. The problem, he says, is that the main beneficiaries of the policy are the middle classes, who will go to university anyway. And he says we should also get over the idea that just because higher education in Scotland is free, that somehow means that it supports people from poorer backgrounds.

In fact, we know it does exactly the opposite but the answer isn’t to make university education free for everyone because by the time people are applying, or not, to go to university, it’s all far too late. Inequality starts much earlier, at school, and is hardened by the resources available at the school and the attitude of the teachers. A friend of mine I studied law with at Aberdeen was one of the very few pupils from his school to go to university. The grant he received meant he was able to go to uni, but the reason all his contemporaries didn’t had nothing to do with university funding – it was because of the failure of his school to raise attainment and aspiration.

It is there, in the classrooms, that the problem and the solution lies, and yet the Scottish Government still insists that the answer is to hand out universal benefits to all Scots regardless of need. Part of me cannot abide the recklessness of that when there is only so much money to go around, but another part of me is angry that help isn’t being targeted at the right places. I didn’t want to be a lawyer in the end, but I’d like to think that anyone who does want to study law can do so. The Scottish Government should be opening those doors; instead, for the sake of policies popular with the middle classes, it is keeping them tightly shut.