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.
Sunak rightly wants to expand the sixth-form curriculum, albeit to five subjects, with compulsory English and maths. He does not define whether English language or literature, and his longstanding fixation with maths has become quasi-religious. All the maths any normal adult needs can be learned in a couple of days from John Allen Paulos’s Innumeracy, with its emphasis on statistics, proportion and risk. All else depends on knowing how to use a calculator or computer, which should indeed be taught. We do not need to know about internal combustion to drive cars. Likewise, languages can be taught intensively in labs in a matter of months. Why spend years?
The sheer inefficiency of the old-fashioned classroom as a vehicle for learning beggars belief. Children need to be taught how to use phones, calculators and, very soon, AI. That is what will help them to get on in work and life. The rest of learning is wonderful but need not be compulsory.
The shelves of the UCL Institute of Education groan with rejected ideas for reforming mainstream education. They go from Montessori and Steiner to the proposals for teaching life-skills, civics, the handling of money, wellbeing, health and relationships. Yet most go to waste in a desert cursed by school quantification and targetry.
The latest report from the radical thinktank Radix argues that the school curriculum is hopelessly out of touch with what should be the upbringing of a modern young person. It remains obsessed with transmitting knowledge, when knowledge is now available at the press of a key: “In an information-saturated world, schools are merely joyless exam factories no longer fit for purpose.” Radix regards as compulsory such matters as elementary numeracy, digital communication, written and verbal skills and civics. Otherwise, teaching in secondary schools should build on what appeals to the aptitude of the individual child.
Another pioneer is the Cambridge Hughes Hall oracy programme, advocating oral skills to build up a child’s confidence in work and relationships. It was refreshing to see Keir Starmer take up the oracy cause earlier this year. It should surely take precedence over academic subjects. Yet mention it to most teachers and they just shrug and say that’s not what they do.
I know few teachers who are not close to despair at having to “teach the test”, to obey orders, fill in forms and wrestle with the indiscipline associated with boring exam bashing. This is not education but a denial of what I recall from my brief experience of the profession. At its best this was the thrill of engaging with a young imagination and leading it forward towards inquiry.
For a government – though it sounded like a party leader – to come up at the last minute with a brand new exam after 13 years in power is not good enough. If ever a policy should be approached on a bipartisan basis, it is education. Sunak’s reformism is welcome, but it needs the fresh air of radicalism. He should offer to set up with Starmer an inquiry into the whole future of the British school curriculum, and do so not as a Tory but as a co-reformer.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
