Last year 45.8% of students achieved five A*-C grades including English and mathematics in the GCSE examination: 54.2% did not.

This annual statistic is one that the government was long reluctant to release. In that English and maths are of such crucial importance, it is the only statistic that matters. We will not know this year’s figure until the autumn, when, fortunately perhaps for the government, the spotlight will have moved off exam statistics.

The schools minister Jim Knight, who, with a commendably straight face, announced last week that “GCSEs are robust, rigorous and respected. The steady improvement over the last 10 years is unarguable evidence of rising achievement and the benefits of sustained investment in teaching and resources”, is presumably confident that there will be a significant improvement on last year’s deeply depressing results.

Unarguable, minister? The Confederation of British Industry, which laments that employers have to lay on remedial English classes for the teen-agers they recruit, and the British Chambers of Commerce, which refers to these results as a “national scandal”, beg to differ.

We all, even the minister, agree that maths and English matter. He proclaimed at his press conference: “English and mathematics are the foundation of a good education.” So why the euphoria when the statistics that have been released show 37.8% of candidates have failed to get at least a C grade in English, 44.8% maths.

Pass rates in these subjects have risen this year by 0.6% and 0.9% respectively. But so what? Given the scale of the failure, these are pathetic increases. Thousands of 16-year-olds are leaving school with no real competence in the subjects that matter most. The employers are right to express, once again, their concerns.

The truth is that the GCSE is neither robust, rigorous nor respected. It is a busted flush. Each year more and more students achieve A and A* grades. These grades might or might not reflect genuine improvements in teaching and learning. What is indisputable is that we are not identifying the best students, the 5-10% who are in fact the most able. But neither are we offering less able students anything meaningful. Yes, 98% of candidates are awarded some sort of grade, but everyone knows that any grade below a C is worthless in the real world.

In that no single exam can ever cater for the whole range of intellectual ability, it was always a nonsense. More and more independent schools are abandoning the GCSE for the international GCSE, an exam that is closer to the old O-level and makes therefore considerably greater demands on candidates. More and more 16-year-olds must be wondering why on earth they are wasting their time. They work, some of them, hard. They end up with a certificate that is not worth the paper it is printed upon.

Hence the increasing panic that appears to grip the Department for Children, Schools and Families. It is 10 years now since Tony Blair promised us a “world class education system”. Taxpayers have dug deep to fund the “investment” to which Knight so proudly refers. More and more of us, parents and employers, are expecting to see real improvements. Ministers can huff and puff, but these GCSE results demonstrate that they are not being delivered.

The latest wheeze in some education circles is to suggest that GCSEs should be divided, as A-levels were some years ago, into units or “modules”. Candidates would be assessed as they complete each module and they would be able to repeat modules they fail. More candidates would, therefore, pass, and, we would all agree that “the evidence for rising achievement is unarguable”.

Equally interesting proposals from the Qualifications and Curriculum authority, the exams watchdog, are on the table for the curriculum. Schools will be given greater freedom over how and what they teach. The so-called key stage 3 national strategy, which for years dictated in minute detail what should be taught and how in the first three years of secondary school is, presumably, to be abandoned. You could not have a more dramatic policy U-turn.

I am mystified by the disconnect. On the one hand, Knight tells us that things could not be rosier in the educational garden and that we should all be delighted at the wisdom of the approach to reform pursued these past 10 years; on the other he announces a departure from the very reforms that are supposed to have delivered so much.

Gordon Brown announced the death of spin. It does not seem, listening to Knight, that every minister has quite understood. Blair prided himself on what he liked to call “an evidence-based approach to education policy”. These GCSE results suggest we have a government that cannot face up to the evidence of its own failure.

Pass rates

- This year’s GCSE A*-C pass rate is 63.3%, slightly up on last year, but the overall pass rate (A-G) slipped to 98%

- State grammars edged ahead of independent schools for the first time with 51.5% of entries awarded A/A* compared with 50.8% in the independent sector and 15.3% in comprehensives

- The A*-C pass rate in maths is 55.2%, in English 62.2%

- Numbers taking languages slumped, with entries for French down 8.2% and German 10.2%. However, Spanish entries rose 3%

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