A levels - August 2010

Last week’s A level results have sparked the annual debate in my postbag about whether standards have improved with so many more passes and A grades, or whether the standards themselves have been lowered. The prejudice is that most politicians don’t know much about any subject, but this is a question on which I have at least some experience. I taught A level Economics from 1980-1987 and I have recently watched two of my own children go through their A levels in the last 4 years. I think there are two separate issues. First, we encourage more and more young people to stay at school for longer, and many sit A levels that would not have done so in the past. To accommodate them a number of ‘softer’ or less rigorous subjects have been introduced. These may well have value in their own right but I think it is misleading to treat them as an A level in the same way as we do a core subject like mathematics. We should call a spade a spade and separate out the academic qualifications that are designed to stretch and to distinguish between university applicants. Equally, we should introduce more rigour into vocational qualifications not designed primarily for university entry, so that greater confidence is placed in them by both the candidates and potential employers.

Second, the nature of A level has changed significantly -and I believe for the worse. I certainly think we make the candidates work harder and longer but I doubt that it is always to the best effect. In my day the A level syllabus gave much wider scope -particularly in the lower VI year- for candidates to broaden their minds and for teachers to really explore the subject without the ever present pressure of exams. The last government  wrecked this by breaking the A level into a number of discrete modules which introduced constant assessments that counted towards the final grade, and the ability for candidates continually to retake the modules to improve their grades. Increasingly candidates are not so much taught the subject as taught to pass assessments. The grade inflation of recent years is a measure of how hard teachers and pupils are working and how efficient they are becoming at mastering the new system, but it is not a measure of an improved understanding of the subject that they have been studying. The sooner the coalition government gets on with restoring the old A level by abolishing the AS level in the lower VI /year 12 and getting rid of modules, the better for teachers, candidates, and education