Education reforms must be given a chance
Today is A-level results day. Students across the land will be discovering whether they have the results they need to get into their university of choice. Some will be thrown into the confusion of clearing. But even those who secure the grades they want will be facing relative uncertainty about what they are worth, because this year a newer, tougher regime has been introduced. Michael Gove may have departed the Department for Education more than three years ago, but his legacy is taking effect now.
That is a good thing. It is vital that A-levels recover their reputation as the gold-standard academic qualification in secondary education. Sadly, the job remains half done. Sally Collier, head of the exam regulator Ofqual, has promised that students will not lose out because of the new rigour of A-levels. Harder exams will be compensated for, she implies, by softer marking. “I want the message to be that students have done fantastically well,” she said. “All our kids are brilliant.”
This is an extraordinary misunderstanding of her own role. Not all students are academically brilliant. The entire point of exams is to find out which are and which aren’t, thereby identifying those best-suited for university education. To pretend otherwise is simply to cheat young people by ushering them into sub-standard degree courses that add nothing to their prospects or future earnings, while saddling them with tuition-fee debt.
The whole point of the Gove reforms was to restore a dose of common sense to proceedings. Yet they risk being strangled at birth by the same blinkered, politically correct, all-must-have-prizes mentality that corroded the education system in the first place.
If Ms Collier really cared about “our kids”, she would contribute to an updated approach to qualifications that stopped students being bundled off to universities in ever-greater numbers to be fleeced without reward, and instead ushered them towards the most suitable, best-value education available – from classics to coding, from three-year courses to three months.
Choice and competition is the key, and the tertiary education sector must respond. Most students put in a huge amount of both hard work and hard cash. They deserve a system that works, not a political football.