September 09

Late summer being the silly season, it would be remiss of me not to contribute to the annual festival of hand-wringing, breast-beating, finger-pointing and navel-gazing that accompanies the publication of the A level results.
This year has provided additional opportunities for pontification and accusation in the prospect of an additional 60,000 university applicants whilst the Government is only prepared to part-fund another 10,000 places. Net result: six disappointed candidates with near-miss results chasing every place in clearing.
If I were a polemical journalist, I would be minded to dub this “The Summer of the Great Betrayal”, but I’ll come to that later. The situation is linked to A level grades and the fact that too many students are achieving top ones for the best universities to be able to make meaningfully discriminatory offers. It is traditional to account for this by fulminating about declining standards and dumbing-down of A levels, so I’d better start there.
Setting aside the question of what the critics would actually prefer (What conclusion would they draw from steadily declining pass rates? You can bet it would not be that exams were getting tougher; it would be that standards of teaching or students’ intelligence were declining). On the face of it, the evidence looks pretty damning: nationally, pass rates are approaching 100%; A grades account for more than a quarter of all results and the rise has been inexorable for the last 27 years, but it was the introduction of Curriculum 2000, when A levels went modular, that saw the beginning of the real acceleration in the top grades.
When you take into account the effects of that one change, the true surprise is that it’s taking so long for the pass rate to reach 100%.
Throughout their two-year course, module results provide A level students with accurate feedback on their progress and likelihood of success while the modular system allows them to abort the course at any point without “certificating” or recording a result. In the circumstances, it could be argued that it requires heroic determination – or epic stupidity – to persevere with a course in which all your intermediate results have assured you of the inevitability of failure.
The AS results, taken at the end of the first year, provide some indication of the scale of this sifting effect. There, the pass rate is around 85%, much closer to the pass rates the carping critics would like to see, and even then, a great many AS results are never certificated, so a great deal of bad news simply vanishes as though it had never been. That goes a long way towards narrowing the gap between the pass rates of 27 years ago and those of today.
But what about the rise in the top grades? Surely that can only be accounted for by less challenging exams? At this point I would normally trot out the argument that the steady improvement in athletics records has not led us to suspect that tracks have been shortened, but, reeling from the advent of Usain Bolt, that might point to a conclusion that today’s A level students are all once-in-a-lifetime freaks of nature, so I’ll try a different simile.
Imagine you have a hundredweight (50 kg) sack of coal to carry up a flight of stairs. You might struggle to do it in one lift, but if you made ten trips with five kilograms of coal in a bucket you would succeed and the desired outcome would be identical. The coal would be no less in quantity or quality and would be in the place you wanted it to be: at the top of the stairs. That, essentially, is the difference between a terminal and a modular examination system. The standard may remain the same, but the method of examining makes it possible for more people to reach it.
Add to this the much greater transparency about mark schemes; the INSET on examination technique provided by Awarding Bodies themselves; the right to see photocopies of marked scripts and challenge results; the de-mystification of the whole process compared with the arcane, inscrutable and deeply inconsistent rituals of the supposed golden age of examining and, above all, perhaps, the opportunity for candidates to re-take modules in which they have underperformed and there isn’t really much more needed to account for the relentless rise in grades.
For those who still doubt the credit due to today’s students for their outstanding achievements, the availability of photocopied scripts can provide a humbling corrective. A few years ago, our candidates in A level English Literature, one of whom was my son, had clearly suffered on the final synoptic A2 paper from the attentions of a rogue marker, so we asked for a selection of scripts. It so happened that one of the questions my son had answered, on Milton, had an almost identical title to one on which I had written an essay in my second year as an undergraduate. Out of curiosity, I dug it out and compared the two. There was absolutely no question that the A2 script, despite being completed under exam conditions, was in every respect a far superior piece of work, and I quietly re-hid my effort from the 1970s, lest my son discover it. All our candidates were duly upgraded on appeal.
As Mike Cresswell, the Chief Executive of AQA, has noted, if A levels really were being dumbed-down, you would expect to see a uniform improvement in all parts of the system, yet, as Dr Cresswell again notes, there are variations by region and by sector. Among the latter, the increase of 2.1% in the proportion (now over 50%) of A grades scored by the independent sector, if translated into world hundred-metre record-beating terms, would leave even Usain Bolt looking flat footed.
However, to be able to prove that the problem of grade inflation is not due to lowered standards, but has rational and predictable causes is not the same thing as solving it, and it is a problem that is driving Admissions Tutors at the most selective universities to ever more recondite ways of differentiating between perfectly-qualified candidates.
The answer must be for selector universities to follow the lead of Cambridge and Imperial in making use of the new A* grade at the earliest possible opportunity, resisting the pressure from Government to delay. The pressure is politically-motivated; as the admirable Dr Cresswell has pointed out, statistically, it is almost certain that the highest proportion of A* grades will go to students educated in the independent sector. This will be politically embarrassing and starkly expose the degree to which the Government is putting pressure on universities to socially-engineer their intake according to criteria other than proven academic ability.
You could hardly make it up: universities complain that reforms to A level have deprived them of the means of discriminating between the best candidates, and ask for a new tool to help them do so. The Government tasks the Awarding Bodies with providing such a tool and they come up with one that looks as though it will meet their requirements. The Government then warns universities not to use it in case it does exactly what it says on the tin and interferes with their Widening-Access agenda. The more pusillanimous universities, afraid of offending their paymasters, do as they’re told.
It will be a further chapter in the saga of unintended consequences in which education policy appears to specialise and which has culminated in “The Summer of the Great Betrayal”.
The story runs thus: In 2000, A levels are reformed to make them more accessible. In 2002 the failure to pilot A2 exams properly results in the prospect of an unprecedented improvement in grades. Awarding Bodies come under pressure to rig the results and the fiasco is exposed by Heads’ associations, chiefly HMC, resulting in ministerial resignations. More young people get the higher grades that will qualify them for university. Meanwhile, the Government publishes a target of 50% of young people to be in Higher Education, but without a commensurate guarantee of increased funding. Simultaneously, the introduction of tuition fees is justified by rhetoric about the lifetime-earnings premium achieved by graduates, based on partial evidence and the status quo ante when graduates had a degree of rarity value in the job market.
Young people buy into the Government’s rhetoric without realising that though all degrees are supposed to be equal, some are manifestly more equal than others, and not every degree from every Higher-Education Institution is a golden road to guaranteed riches. Meanwhile, they accrue end-of-course debts now estimated at £23,000. Summer 2009 delivers these graduates into the middle of a recession and a dearth of graduate-level – indeed any level - employment opportunities.
In the same year, the latest and largest generation of school leavers to believe the Government’s promises, applies to university only to find that the cash-strapped Government has capped the number of places available, threatened universities with financial penalties for exceeding their recruitment targets and put an artificial ceiling on the number of places available for home students.
Nice one Gordon.

Andrew Grant, Headmaster, St Albans Schwool.
Chairman of The Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference