Every now and again, my alma mater is in the news, and why wouldn’t it be? Britain is obsessed with schools and class. Bedales provides ample fodder for both: the boarding school in Hampshire is famously ‘liberal’ – and was so even when England was famously illiberal. Bedales, whose graduates include Lily Allen, is the educational equivalent of Tatler smashed together with Vogue.

Bedales hit the headlines again this week because it is the first school in the country to ditch GCSEs – those entering now will take just two, in maths and English. The rest will be a mixture of the usual subjects like history and physics, with Bedales’ own-brand, such as outdoor work (including learning how to corral sheep).

I found myself in a sea of terrifyingly glamorous and sexually experienced teens

This almost total abandonment follows the swapping, in 2006, of half of GCSEs with BACs (Bedales Assessed Courses).The idea behind the present radical move takes the logic further: GCSEs, a relentless, gruelling cascade of grading rubrics and boxes to tick, are hardly considered the best for kids or their minds – by anyone. The Times Education Committee considered them ‘unfit for purpose’ in a report last year. And, channeling the educational vision of Bedales founder and ongoing icon John Badley, who opened the co-educational school in 1898, Bedales does not think exams like GCSEs actually get children’s epistemological fires burning. They learn things by rote to get points and don’t get a chance to feel curious or to learn in a stimulating way, which the full switch to BACs will change, according to Will Goldsmith, Bedales’ head.

The logic here sounds good to me: the heavy-handed assessment of children in English schools is absolutely horrible and I thank my lucky stars I avoided most of it. Still, I can’t help but chortle when I read of the world still taking Bedales’ educational policies so seriously.

I arrived in time for A-levels – in 1998 – having accepted a violin scholarship that made tuition fees manageable. I had decided to go to Bedales because my father had been in the 1960s and had liked it. It seemed a mixture of the friendly, the intellectual and the non-coercive, and in my father’s day (and after) it was equally good at producing comedians and artists and actors as it was Oxbridge physicists and classicists.

When I arrived, however, there was no sign of the Oxbridge tendency. I found myself in a sea of terrifyingly glamorous and sexually experienced teens who all promptly got on with the main business of the school: allocating power based on who fancied who. There were many binge drinking sessions in the fields, jaunts on Wednesdays and Saturday afternoons (there was Saturday school) into Petersfield for smoking, drinking, having curries and other mischief. Back at school at night, for those whose alcohol needs had not been met, there was a bar for sixth-formers open on Fridays and Saturdays. I can’t remember exactly, but I think we could all have three drinks, which at 16 and fresh from America, seemed extraordinary.

The school meant well. But while teachers were generally friendly, and some were very good, others were downright jokes and many seemed to struggle to be taken seriously. Teaching took place in sheds that were meant to be temporary when built decades earlier.

By my second year of sixth form, I had realised something important. If you weren’t a svelte and beautiful multilingual European, or a Londoner with rock-star ancestry whose parents had homes in Marylebone and Bordeaux, or Notting Hill and Tuscany, or the child of diplomats or executives who had to fly back to Zimbabwe or Greece in holidays, then you were never going to fit in. Unless you smoked and drank more than everyone else, that is.

I didn’t fit any of these bills. Which meant I had nothing else to occupy myself with but the education. If everyone is fawning over Bedales’ educational ‘philosophy’ now, there was also a fair bit of it then. The overnight bread baking! The sheep shearing! The art and design and theatre!

But there was no ‘philosophy’ discernible to me. I bread-baked once throughout the night. I had little contact with sheep. But thanks to teachers I liked in English and economics – and a genuine enjoyment of both subjects (unlike French, my third A-level) – I ended up working diligently. I came up with my own systems of revision on flash cards, and memorised past paper multiple choice questions of which some number would certainly appear on the exam and, to my great satisfaction, did. The more my peers had sex and got wasted and formed alliances of the cool, the fancied and the bad-ass, the more estranged from them I became, and the more time I spent revising in the beautiful Arts and Crafts library, or in my room (Bedales mercifully offered Upper Sixth boarders private bedrooms).

The real currency of success at Bedales, at least during my time, was being beautiful, self-assured and glamorous. The educational philosophy, indeed the education itself, was always secondary, if not tertiary. Bedales is a friendly, socially intoxicating environment, and that counts for a lot. But the high volume of talented graduates it produces is surely less to do with its ‘educational philosophy’, and more to do with the artistically assured sorts that are attracted to – and can afford – it.