THE Government’s success in improving education standards was called into question yesterday by research showing that most secondary school pupils do not achieve good GCSE grades in three “core subjects”.

More than 300,000 teenagers failed to gain at least a grade C in English, mathematics and science last summer. Just 39 per cent of 16-year-olds passed all three subjects with good grades, despite 11 years of compulsory study. At ordinary comprehensives — those which have not become specialist schools — only one in three pupils gained good grades in these subjects.

English, maths and science are the only three subjects that pupils have to take throughout their school careers. The scale of failure in them has been masked by the rising proportion of 16-year-olds achieving five passes overall at grades A* to C, which reached 51 per cent last summer, a year ahead of the Government’s target.

But the research by Professor David Jesson, of York University, has exposed how few youngsters get good grades in all three subjects. His findings have been sent to David Miliband, the School Standards Minister, who is to announce wide-ranging curriculum reforms later this month.

Professor Jesson was given access to the database of the 2002 GCSE results at the Department for Education and Skills and discovered that 61 per cent failed to reach grade C in the three subjects.

He said: “It is strange that this is not a performance indicator that anybody appears to have looked at, because it is of immense importance.”

He said that teachers could be concentrating on getting teenagers to pass any five subjects at grade C and above to help their school’s overall pass rate in the exam league tables.

“There are no criteria that say pupils have to pass English, maths and science at this level, so people are going for a combination that includes other subjects,” he said.

Professor Jesson added that Mr Miliband’s reform of the curriculum for 14 to 19-year-olds was an important opportunity to stress the importance of high standards for all pupils in English, maths, and science.

But the Education Department has agreed a performance target with the Treasury that requires schools to achieve annual increases of two percentage points in the number of pupils gaining five good GCSEs between 2002 and 2006 — double the average annual rate of improvement between 1997 and 2002.

Professor Jesson found that specialist schools, praised byTony Blair as the future of comprehensive education, did better than the national average. Of 131,000 pupils in them who sat GCSEs last year, 40.3 per cent passed English, maths and science with at least grade C. Only 34.8 per cent of the 383,000 16-year-olds in non-specialist secondaries achieved the same standard.

Sir Cyril Taylor, chairman of the Specialist Schools Trust, which commissioned the research, said: “It is pretty worrying that two thirds of pupils in non-specialist schools cannot get a C or better in the three core subjects. We are not that happy with 40 per cent either.”

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