Guess which policy in Rishi Sunak’s busy conference speech will never see the light of day. The answer is the “Advanced British Standard”, the exhilaratingly titled successor to the A-level. He promises it will offer more exams, more classroom time, more maths, £600m in extra cost and not arrive for 10 years. It is the HS2 of educational reform.
The reason it will disappear is because it faces Britain’s most reactionary profession, school-teaching. To all proposals of reform, the teachers cry, “Just give us more money.” The National Education Union said Sunak was “out of touch with reality”. The University and College Union accused him of “tinkering round the edges”. The National Association of Head Teachers said he “should be focusing on fixing crises”.
It is almost 20 years since the Tomlinson report first proposed to abolish A-levels. It proposed to replace them with a single, broad-based secondary education. The Blair government consulted the teachers and killed it. No government since has touched the issue. As exams have proliferated and corrupted the curriculum, so “examinitis” has produced an ever more rigidified and centralised school service. At its heart lies that citadel of curricular authoritarianism, Ofsted. Its tyranny of rule by statistics is driving ever more children to mental disorder – up in England from one in nine in 2017 to one in six in 2020 – and ever more teachers to despair. The system is truly rotten.
A-levels were invented in 1951 to enable those staying on at school after 15 to try out what they might prefer to study at university. It reflected the archaic assumption that the best start in life for bright young people is through academic specialisation. I specialised in maths, then classics, and by 18 I had forgotten everything I learned. Its usefulness to me was zero. The best my teacher could suggest was that they had “trained my brain”. Today’s A-levels are supposedly the key to a good job or university, yet employers are now swinging in favour of experience over education, and, according to some studies, most no longer ask about A-level or degree grades.
