All That Glistens...

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Contributing Editor of Attain, Tim Johnson, looks at the changing status of the A level and wonders whether it is time to copy Montague Norman, and leave the ‘Gold Standard’.

’Tis the season.  The front pages of the newspapers are filled with pictures of pretty blonde girls from nice schools celebrating their results; the letters pages are filled with disquiet over pass rates touching 98%.  The old guard protest that exams are easier, standards are slipping and the country’s going to the dogs.  Teachers and politicians retort that the teaching is better, the children are brighter and any complaint of ‘dumbing down’ is an insult to our wonderful hard-working children.

Not only that.  If you seek to distinguish between Maths and History on the one hand, and Media Studies, Citizenship and Film Studies on the other you are guilty, according to the head of the NASUWT, of making ‘a divisive, elitist and false distinction between subjects’.  Well, we should all try and avoid making divisive distinctions, I’m sure we can all agree.  And in truth there’s only so much to be said about the fact that exams are getting easier.  Of course they are.  Exams have always been getting easier.  When I was preparing to sit my scholarship papers about a hundred or so years ago, we used to practise French by using old Eton papers from the 1950s.  They were and remained the hardest examination papers I have ever seen, up to and including my Finals.  So hard were they that, when I ran up the white flag and asked the French department of my mother’s school for help, they too were stumped.

Looking further back, even eleven-plus papers from the turn of the twentieth century seem almost impossibly difficult now.  And yet this is only ever half of the story.  Every accusation of dumbing down can be countered by an accusation of the limitations of rote learning.  Grammar school pupils used to have to learn how to use log tables and slide rules.  Exactly how useful have they proved?

The real question is what you want A levels to be for.  When less than 10% of children went on to university, the A level was a hurdle, designed to separate the true gold from the dross.  If only the very best are going to go on to higher education, then you want an exam that identifies those very best: the academic elite.  By setting a standard that only a very few can attain, you can identify those on whom it is worth spending public money.  Equally, if you are only looking for the academic elite, then you can focus more or less exclusively on core academic subjects – Maths, English, the Classics and so forth.

The entire point of the, nominally, tri-partite educational establishment of grammar schools, secondary moderns and technical colleges (those neglected children of the Rab Butler inheritance), was to winnow out those few who could truly benefit from a university experience, and then, having identified them, provide them with as good an education as could be had anywhere in the world.  It is no coincidence that the ratio of state and independently educated students at Oxford and Cambridge tilted dramatically in favour of the independent sector following the evisceration of the grammar schools started by Tony Crosland. 

Grammar schools were a powerful motor for the creation of a more socially egalitarian elite.  A levels were the great leveller.  Independent schools were forced to up their game, when faced with academic competition from schools in the state sector.  A levels were then a way of demonstrating excellence both on the part of the individual, and on the part of the school.

By definition this was an elitist system, designed for a world where the truly glittering prizes were available to the capable regardless of their social background.  By way of example, look at the members of Beyond the Fringe.  Peter Cook was a colonial civil servant’s son, educated at Radley.  Dudley Moore was an electrician’s son from Dagenham.  Jonathan Miller went to St Paul’s, while Alan Bennett went to Leeds Modern.  Yet together they formed an elite – the ‘New Establishment’.

However, any system that cultivates the top 10-15% necessarily excludes, or at least marginalises, the overwhelming majority of the population.  The comprehensive system was largely a reaction to this fact.  The belief that every child deserves a top class education is an understandable one.  The fact that, despite the apparent level playing field, the grammar schools were predominantly middle class schools helped stoke the fires of class activism.  Elitism itself became almost indistinguishable, at least from the perspective of the left, from the perpetual rule of the upper and upper middle classes.  John Prescott is characteristically forthright in his motivations for wanting to help smash the grammar schools: the loss of the bike he was promised for passing the eleven plus – and never received following his failure – echoed throughout his political career.

Arguably, however, in throwing out the bathwater of the old educational system the new comprehensive ideal also threw out the baby of valuing true academic achievement.  The concentration on the previously neglected 85% of the population who would not have gone to grammar school left the former beneficiaries of the grammar schools either fleeing to the welcoming arms of the independent sector, or abandoned to a system not designed for them.  The chances of the middle classes, let alone the poor, of reaching the elite were dramatically reduced.

This was, largely, a feature rather than a bug of the system.  The driving force of the comprehensive system was to improve the prospects of previously disadvantaged classes: almost as a conscious rebuke to the grammar schools’ advancement of the middle classes.  And as a consequence of this, the central aim of the A level was to change.  Where it had been a hurdle, to separate out the true elite, it was to become a gateway, to enable the masses to achieve higher educational standards.  It’s probably lucky that Tony Blair wasn’t education secretary back in the late seventies – there must otherwise have been a good chance that the A level would have been renamed as ‘the People’s Exam’.

It is very easy to complain that the A level has become too easy.  The modular structure, allowing numerous re-sits, coupled with the increasing importance of coursework, has turned an exam from a sprint, in which results were dependent entirely on performance on the day, into a marathon, where slow and steady can win the race.  Add to this the proliferation of new, non-academic subjects, with all due respect to the head of the NASUWT and the echoes of Lewis Carroll’s Caucus Race become more and more apparent: ‘Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.’

But that is the point of the modern A level.  If, as has been determined by men much wiser than I am, yea even as far as the great Lord Mandelson, Duke of Omnium and Grand Panjandrum, 50% of all children must go to University, why then, the A level must make that possible.  Rather than a hurdle, it must become a threshold.  Instead of a way of straining out the elite, it must be a way of empowering the majority.  It is perhaps instructive that the A level is referred to as the Gold Standard of exams.  For the Gold Standard was, of course, a now defunct method of valuing currencies based on their convertibility into gold.  You don’t have to be as addicted to crashing symbolism as I am to see parallels between the wholesale devaluation of currencies that has been seen since the Gold Standard’s abandonment, and the soaring pass rates for A levels.

The real crux of the matter, which would take a book properly to dissect, is the criminal failure of technical and vocational education.  In their absence, the A level has been forced to take on the burden of all educational attainment.  It is this that really explains the new exams in Film Studies, Dance or Dress and Textiles.  To return to the monetary metaphor: as the number of subjects for A level has undergone inflation, so too has the exam been devalued.  Equally, once a currency has been devalued, it is sometimes easier to start afresh with a new version than to try and reform the old.

In the independent sector this is already happening, as schools convert to the International Baccalaureate, and I suspect that this trend will continue.  Yet there is surely an argument to return to an exam that measures pure academic accomplishment, an exam that provides a more rigorous challenge to pupils.  For if a third of all pupils get three As, how do we know which are the best?  If all must have prizes, how do we determine who has deserved them most?

Tim Johnson was educated at Winchester College, where he recorded the lowest mark in the French scholarship paper seen in 20 years.

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