A-levels fail to make the grade in teaching our pupils to think - Yorkshire Post, 17 June 2009

HISTORICALLY, great Yorkshire universities saw their role as inspiring and motivating local students to come to their institutions.

They were the intellectual leaders of the local community. In 1903, Sheffield and Leeds came together with three other northern universities to establish the Joint Matriculation Board (JMB) to set quality school exams, following the earlier establishment of the Oxford and Cambridge boards.

By studying the JMB A-level, pupils would learn what they needed to study and thrive in higher education.

A hundred years later, the A-level has never been more popular - 46 per cent of school leavers will take A-levels and 76 per cent of those will go on to university. It has been a social mobility success story.

Yet the universities who got the ball rolling are now cut out from the process. Exams are set and monitored by national agencies QCA (Qualifications and Curriculum Authority) and Ofqual (Office of the Qualifications and Examinations Regulator).

Neither of these bureaucracies have a single academic on their executive team. Instead, recruits include civil servants and utility regulators. The results are clear in the A-level exams that they
turn out.

Reform carried out research with leading academics, Professor Francis O'Gorman, Head of English and Ian Moxon, Lecturer in History from Leeds University; and Dr Dewi Lewis and Professor RA Bailey from the University of London.

They found that A-levels have become "sat-nav" qualifications that guide students through many-parted questions, without making them think for themselves. The excitement of academic discovery has been replaced by an
obsessive pursuit of "learning outcomes" and "assessment objectives".

Breaking A-levels up into six separately-examined modules fails to encourage students to link together different pieces of knowledge and skills. In subjects like maths, where each new piece of knowledge depends upon building blocks at the previous level, modularisation makes it difficult for students to build an effective mathematical toolkit.

Modularisation has also created four separate exam sessions across the two years of A-levels, impacting substantially on the amount of time teachers have available to actually teach.

Mark schemes are now extremely restrictive, specifying the specific keywords or parts of answers that markers are allowed to reward. The result is that students do not have to structure answers well or think logically through multiple stages of a problem.

Markers are unable to distinguish between students who write exceptionally thoughtful or intelligent answers and those who just reproduce a long list of facts.

Academic coherence has been abandoned in the hope that the numbers of students staying on after 16 would be transformed. But it has not worked.

Participation increased by 36 per cent between 1987 and 1997 when a linear syllabus was still in place. In the following decade (1997 to 2007), when modularisation became widespread, participation increased by only eight per cent.

Although they have no involvement in these exams, universities are left to pick up the pieces. They report a generation of "high-maintenance students" who seek constant advice and are not as capable of reasoning as those entering university in the 1990s.

This is not just Russell Group students such as those at Leeds studying sciences; this diminution is taking place in arts subjects such as English and in the new universities.

Both Government and Opposition are currently reviewing the future of A-levels. There needs to be a new approach.

Firstly, ideas that would weaken academic study even further, such as academic Diplomas and the new "Use of Maths" A-level should be abandoned.

This exam would mean students studying how to use maths rather than studying maths itself.

Secondly, our report recommends putting a broad spread of leading academics across the country in charge of A-levels. There are already subject groups that can do this. Groups such as the Heads of Departments of Mathematical Sciences and the Council for College and University English taking on this responsibility would provide a direct subject link and avoid the need to establish yet another group of pen-pushers.

It would mean academics from Leeds and Sheffield and other universities, such as Bradford and Huddersfield, would once again be involved in shaping the exams that students in local schools sit.

In the course of the research, Reform visited the David Young Community Academy in Seacroft, where the aspiration for achievement is palpable. One pupil said that the reason he enjoyed attending the school so much was that they wanted all the pupils to aim for A and A* grades.

We need to give these and other pupils something real and trusted to go for. As Francis O'Gorman puts it in the report: "Intellectual integrity is not the privilege of an exclusive elite. It is the foundation of a good education."

Elizabeth Truss is deputy director of Reform, an independent think-tank which is publishing a new report, A new level, today on education standards (www.reform.co.uk)

THE VIEWS OF TWO ACADEMICS

Professor Francis O'Gorman, Head of English, Leeds University.

• "Exam questions are never innocent things. The principles and assumptions behind them are suggestive indicators of the principles and assumptions behind an educational system."
• The issue is "not the level of analysis that is being required, but the shape of it".
• The most obvious change is the restrictions placed by exam questions on what students can write: students do not have "freedom to use their own minds".
• "There is a template for what is expected from a successful answer."
• A-levels "need to encourage proper, independent, self-critical argument".

Ian Moxon, Lecturer in History, Leeds University.

• It used to be the case that "the business of the examining board was assessment, from a university perspective, of the achievements of pupils prepared by the schools".
• The character and content of those "pedagogic methods were the concern of the schools and the teachers".
• "A-level history had been the application of a candidate's intelligence and critical abilities (whereas now the emphasis is on the practical techniques for studying the past."

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