The English education system has become “fatally distorted” by an unhealthy fixation with an anachronistic examinations system that ill prepares students for university, a leading academic has warned.

Niall Ferguson, professor of history at Harvard University in the US and a senior research fellow at Oxford University, said that teenagers in England were handicapped by an over-emphasis on timed examinations and by being forced to chose between arts and science subjects too early.

Professor Ferguson blamed “the tyranny of A levels” for forcing teenagers into narrowly defined paths of study and called for them to be replaced with a baccalaureate style qualification covering a broad mix of arts and science subjects and involving an element of independent research rather than assessment purely by examinations. Teaching in America, where teenagers and undergraduates study a much broader curriculum, had made him realised that “what we are doing here is wrong,” Professor Ferguson said. At Harvard, students start by taking eight courses spanning science, culture and ethics.

“I can think of few worst preparations for Harvard than a typical English secondary education,” he said. Technological advances in the world meant that it was necessary for all students to have a broad based education and to continue maths after the age of 16, he said. But too often the A level system did not allow this.

“There is still a tendency for people to be arts A level students or science A level students,” he said. He bitterly regretted as a teenagers being forced to chose between history and maths as a sixth former because of a timetable class at his school.The English examinations system had been imported from Beijing in the mid-1800s and was modelled directly on the ancient Chinese system for selecting government administrators initiated in 165 BC and refined in 1350.

“Once the British discovered examinations, they became addicted to them,” he said. It was comical, he added, how much the English exam system resembled the target-driven planned economy of the old Soviet Union in which every last detail was controlled from the centre and based on inadequate information and ideological preoccupations.

Although the new diploma qualification for 14 to 19-year-olds is designed to offer students more continual assessment and to reduce exam pressure, Professor Ferguson dismissed it as “not fit for university”. He welcomed the introduction of a new qualification called the Extended Project (EP), worth the equivalent of an AS (or half an A level), which enters the national curriculum from September as a compulsory part of the new diplomas and also as a stand alone qualification which can be taken alongside A levels. The EP, which comprises an individual research project rather than an exam, requires students to produce a 6,000 word dissertation or scientific investigation, or to manufacture an artefact or stage a performance. They must give a ten minute presentation on their research to two teachers and a group of fellow students and take questions at the end.

Professor Ferguson was speaking at a conference yesterday on the EP at Rugby School in Warwickshire, which has pioneered a science-based version of the EP called Perspectives on Science. John Taylor, head of physics at Rugby and chief EP examiner for the Edexcel exam board, said that the EP would help students develop research skills and enhance their thinking skills.

Jess Paul, 20, a second year history student at Cambridge University, who was one of the first students to trial the Perspectives on Science EP course at Rugby, said: “No matter how good your teachers are and how much they want you to have your own ideas, anything you do for A levels comes from them.

"The Extended Project allowed me to research my own project and to own my own ideas because it made me explore the steps that were leading me to my conclusions".

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