I was surprised to read an interview with my father, the opera director and neuropsychologist Sir Jonathan Miller, in last week’s Culture section, where he claimed his children “didn’t do very well, they didn’t go to university. It’s a disappointment – they could have done better, made more of a living, got more satisfaction”.

I know my father is proud of what we have become, but he is also racked with guilt about the massive gamble he took with our education. Driven by a mistaken ideology, in the late Sixties he and my mother insisted on putting us into state education rather than send us to private school as they could have done. It turned out to be a cavalier social experiment that saw all three of his children fail to gain a single academic qualification. He is right to feel guilty: it was a wholly avoidable disaster.

What drove my parents to take this gamble? We grew up in an intellectual enclave near London’s Regent’s Park, with neighbours such as Alan Bennett, George Melly, Shirley Conran and AJ Ayer. To my parents and their friends, who were all public-school and Oxbridge educated, private education was not about cold showers and sexually dubious housemasters but about stimulating educators who had inspired and motivated them.

Somewhat naively they embraced the new socialist principles of a state education for all. They saw no reason why the atmosphere of learning that had prevailed at the private schools of their childhood, where the world was explored, discussed and debated, wouldn’t be replicated in the classrooms of the state. How wrong they were.

My schooling began in 1969, at Primrose Hill state primary, and in 1975 I went on to Pimlico comprehensive. If you were to ask me what I remember learning, I think I could just about recall that the Romans took long baths and hated the Scots. To be fair, Pimlico was the best of the worst: it had an outstanding music course, which, for half the day, protected middle-class children from the terror that took place elsewhere in the school.

The musicians at Pimlico were hated and known as “melons” because they turned their noses up at the school meals for a deli up the road that sold very good spaghetti bolognese and water melons. A favourite pastime was “melon bashing”: the challenge at lunchtime was to get from the school to the deli without being beaten up for your dinner money.

In my first year, a friend of mine and I were cornered by a gang of boys who accused us of being “pooftas”. At 12 I was frightened of what was about to happen, and confused by the accusation. My friend kept his wits and decided to challenge them on the meaning of the word “poofta”. One of the boys proudly informed us it meant a posh person. After my friend tried to further enlighten them on the inaccuracies of their terminology, they, thankfully, became bored and left us alone. But matters didn’t always end so quietly.

In those days, Pimlico streamed many of its classes. All well and good if you stayed at the top, but thanks to my daily obsession with how to get home without being terrorised at the school gate, I soon slipped into the next stream down where the classroom was a war zone.

The worst lesson was French, where I was relegated to the CSE class because I failed a single written test. Having positioned myself in the relative safety of the back row, where I could avoid being hit by flying furniture, the teacher noticed how badly I squinted at the blackboard. In order to remain in the back row, I managed to acquire a pair of (useless) glasses within days, and so slid further behind.

Outside the classroom, conversations revolved around the previous night’s television or how a girl in the fourth year had managed to get herself pregnant.

What is beyond all comprehension is why neither my parents, nor those of my friends, carried out any due diligence when sending their children off into such uncharted waters. They only recently admitted that they had no idea what was going on. The amazing thing is I don’t remember ever discussing it with them. But I think there were days when they knew I wasn’t happy. My siblings coped in other ways: my younger sister Kate went – or so my parents thought – to Camden school for girls, but it later transpired had been managing a cafe in Kentish Town.

It finally ended at 16 when my parents gave in to my endless pleas and sent me to Bedales. But it was too late: I went on to fail my science A-levels and had to ditch my father’s dream of becoming a doctor. As it turned out, I didn’t fare too badly. Despite the lack of qualifications, I have had a relatively successful career. I started in television as a teaboy and went on to run a large independent TV production company. I then joined forces with Nigella Lawson as her business partner, running her production and brand business. In 2004 I was bought out and set up a brand-creation business.

As a result, I have been able to send my own children private. This has created much debate with my parents. For me there is a feeling of “I told you so”: my children possess happiness and security that I never had. I sleep at night knowing they are protected from the daily fear I experienced.

But I am also conflicted. My parents were ultimately right that it is grossly unfair that anyone who cannot afford to go private has to tolerate an underfunded state system that seems to put more emphasis on sex education and media studies than science and history, a system that fails to provide adequate protection from the feral youths who now seemingly dictate the timetable.

In some ways, I share their ideals, but having rather unfairly been the guinea pig in the experiment, I won’t take that risk with my own children. Still, would I have done better had I gone to university? Probably not. Has anyone asked me how many A-levels I have? Only as a joke.

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