HALF of all A levels taken by girls this summer were awarded A or B grades, results released by the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ) showed yesterday.

Girls obtained more A grades than boys in every major subject except foreign languages, giving them a clear edge in the competition for places at top universities.

The rise in the total proportion of A grades awarded was the second largest in 40 years, up 1.3 percentage points this year to a new record of 24.1 per cent. The overall pass rate rose for the 24th successive year to 96.6 per cent, up 0.4 of a percentage point on last year.

In mathematics, 43.5 per cent of candidates were awarded an A, as were a third of candidates in chemistry, classics, French, German, economics and Spanish. The bumper haul of top grades prompted criticism that the A level no longer enabled universities and employers to identify the most able candidates.

The gender gap widened at the top, with 25.3 per cent of girls’ exams awarded A grades compared with 22.7 per cent for boys. Boys dominated the tiny minority of A-level failures, with 4.2 per cent of their papers ungraded against 2.8 per cent for girls.

Ellie Johnson Searle, director of the JCQ, said that rising pass rates at A level reflected a change of culture. The Curriculum 2000 reforms, which introduced AS levels at 17, enabled students to complete subjects for A level that they already knew they were good at.

“This is not the 1960s any more — we talk about inclusion, we don’t talk about exclusivity,” she said; but Dr Searle acknowledged the difficulty facing elite universities of distinguishing between students with clutches of A grades.

“This year, 9.5 per cent of them achieved three As at A level, and what are we going to do about that?” she said.

Reforms to provide universities with the grades achieved by students in individual units of their exams would help next year, she said. In the meantime, Dr Searle suggested that universities could ask students for this information.

The Government plans to add tougher questions to exam papers to challenge the best students. Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, has indicated that he favours a new A* grade to reward students who do well on these questions, but John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “This will devalue grades A and B, and increase stress and anorexia among bright 17 and 18 year-olds, as happened when GCSE A* grades were introduced.”

Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said that increasing numbers of schools were switching to the International Baccalaureate diploma instead of A levels because it was seen as a more demanding qualification.

“We could in the long term see Baccalaureate for the elite universities and then the specialist diploma [for the rest],” he said.

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