LAMENTS ON “dumbing down” in schools and diatribes against the “grade inflation” in GCSE and A levels have become a media staple at this time of year, as surely as denunciations of consumerism at Christmas. But the clearest evidence of intellectual decay in Britain lies in the quality of this debate itself.
Saloon-bar bores will always believe that school exams are easier today than they were in some dimly remembered golden past of Latin hexameters and fagging. But the perennial demands for a major overhaul of A levels, or even for their total replacement with the International Baccalaureate (IB) or a new Tomlinson diploma, are deficient in at least two fundamental ways.
First, they distract attention from the genuine problems of British education, which are at the bottom of the intellectual scale, not the top. Secondly, the relatively minor faults that do exist at the top end of the school and university system could easily be resolved by a small modification of A levels, without the huge costs, uncertainties and disruptions of further structural reform.
One observation suffices to show that the annual rows about A levels and GCSEs are a huge distraction from the true educational challenges facing Britain. For all the complaints about grade inflation, the laments about foreign language teaching and the outrage over social bias (in both directions) of top university admissions, none of these issues has anything whatsoever to do with the real failure of our education system: the failure to instil basic skills and discipline into the bottom 20 or 30 per cent of the scale. If British politicians and educationists had spent the past 40 years focusing on the control of violent and disruptive pupils instead of tinkering with grammar schools, universities and exams, Britain might not be disgraced today by Europe’s nastiest and most ignorant underclass.
To see, by contrast, that the top of the education system is doing rather well, despite all the accusations of “dumbing down”, we can note the global demand for places at Britain’s best universities and schools. Even more importantly, we can look at Britain’s recent economic performance. Particularly significant is not just the relatively high overall growth rate, but the fact that British is now more specialised than any other G7 country in economic activities with a high educational content — finance, law, advertising, architecture, software, aerospace, pharmaceuticals and so on. Of course, the comparative advantage in some of these fields is partly due to the English language; but even allowing for this, recent improvements in global competitiveness suggest that Britain’s high-end education is probably stronger today in comparison with the rest of Europe than it was a generation ago.
Does this mean that ministers are right when they claim that each successive year’s “record” crop of exam results represents a genuine advance? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that getting an A grade in history or maths today probably does require a comparable attainment, in terms of knowledge, hard work and intelligence, as it did in the early 1990s (when serious research on comparability started).
But no, in that far more candidates are capable today of reaching this standard. This must imply that an A grade does not represent the same degree of excellence, by the very definition of this word, as it did 15 years ago. A four-minute mile is just as hard to run today as it was in the days of Roger Bannister, but it is no longer good enough to win a gold medal.
The fact that 28 per cent of Britain’s teenagers now pass three A levels, compared with 18 per cent in 1994, represents a genuine and welcome advance for British education, but it also means that getting three A levels is no longer enough for a ranking in the top fifth of one’s generation. Three A grades used to secure a place among the top 10,000 students in the country and therefore to guarantee a place at a leading university, but now there are 24,000 students reaching this level of attainment, so three A grades are no longer good enough, on their own, to get into Oxbridge or medical school. To do so requires some proof of excellence in comparison with other candidates, which A-level results, designed to measure a standard level of attainment, can no longer provide. In this sense the A level really is like the gold standard: it may well represent an ounce of educational gold, but in a growing economy, the value of gold tends to decline in relation to GDP.
The distinction between attainment and excellence goes to the heart of the exam-reform debate. If the proposed alternatives to A levels claim to improve overall educational attainment, then these claims (for example, the alleged superiority of the IB) should be discussed on their merits and not as part of the grade-inflation debate. If, on the other hand, the real problem is the one manifest flaw in the present grading system — the fact that some candidates with “perfect” GCSEs and A levels are rejected by top universities and left with an understandable sense of grievance — then the solution does not require any heavy-handed reform of a curriculum and exam structure that has served British higher education at least as well as “bac” has served France.
All that is needed is a minor tweak in the system of grading: adding a new grade of A* to the existing five grades. Even if this A* grade were set moderately higher than the existing A-grade boundary, it would quite easily distinguish the good students from those who are outstanding (at least in their ability to pass exams). According to research by the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, an A*, which demanded a mark of 90 per cent, instead of the 80 per cent required for the present A grade, would cut the number of top grades awarded in maths from 41 per cent to 9 per cent, in English from 33 to 8 per cent and in history from 23 per cent to only 3 per cent. The number of students receiving three A*s would drop to well below the number of places in top universities and medical schools.
In fact, the number of students attaining these top marks would probably be so small that the leading universities could abandon their time- consuming and capricious interviews, giving automatic admission to all of these truly outstanding students. Oxford and Cambridge, for example, have 6,500 places each year between them, compared with only 2,000 students who currently receive nine A*s in their GCSEs. Thus top universities who offered automatic admission for students with outstanding exam grades would be left with plenty of places to fill with young people from underprivileged backgrounds and those with broader attainments, such as music or drama.
The sense of injustice and grievance about university admissions on both sides of the class divide would vanish and the ridiculous Office of Fair Access could be abolished, saving millions of pounds. Schools and universities could get back to education, instead of class war and ministers could focus on the real problem in the British education system — the non-education of the underclass.
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