A-Level reform: The price of pleasing all

Introducing breadth to the curriculum has brought benefits despite the crticisms, says Wendy Berliner

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A diet too heavy for students

Confusion and patchwork adoption of A-level reform

Benefits for mature students

The teacher: This wasted opportunity

The pupil: 'We did see ourselves as guinea pigs'

The pupil: 'It's been very hard work - but it will be worth it'

The teacher: 'A sacrifice of personal breadth'

The new UCAS scorecard

External links

UCAS online

The old system of post-16 qualifications was in urgent need of reform. A-levels were a two-year academic course first introduced in 1951 as a university entrance exam in a time when there were far fewer universities and students than today.

The students they were designed for went to selective schools, often independent ones, and the universities they were destined for were pretty homogeneous, providing undiluted academic fare and research; any vocational subjects offered were those aiding entry to the prestige professions – medicine or law, for example.

The higher education scene now could not be more different. More than one third of school leavers now go to university – most of them from comprehensive schools, a few from very disadvantaged backgrounds. The universities have changed too. They include the former polytechnics with their strong bias towards less glamorous vocational subjects.

Despite the introduction of course -work and modular study in some subjects, A-levels have remained substantially the same – a gold standard not to be tampered with. Any attempt to get parity of esteem between academic A-levels and vocationally related equivalent level courses has always been doomed to failure because nothing has been considered as good as A-level.

This has not been without good reason; A-level courses were demanding. The bright student was unlikely to take more than three subjects (often all sciences or all arts), so the academic diet was narrow – although it was improving. In 1962, only one in 10 A-level students mixed their subjects, but this had risen to more than a third by 1995.

Enter Curriculum 2000, a new post-16 system of qualifications for England, Wales and Northern Ireland. A system which split A-level in half so that AS-levels, which were not meant to be as hard as A-level, could be taken in the first year of the lower sixth, allowing more subjects to be studied. They were to be a qualification in their own right that would lead on to A2, a more difficult level than A-level, so that, overall, standards were maintained.

Alongside were to be Advanced Vocational Certificates of Education (Vocational A-levels) and key skills certificates in communication, number and IT. For the very brightest there were to be Advanced Extension Awards in the second year of the sixth form.

So have they broadened the sixth form curriculum? A little. UCAS surveyed 1,300 schools and found that two thirds of students following an academic curriculum were doing four AS-levels; 3.6 per cent were doing five, the figure that the Government had encouraged students to do and 17.8 per cent were doing three. Some 8.4 per cent of students had dropped one or more AS subjects.

About three quarters were expected to do three A2s in the second year and 14.4 per cent to take four. Under the old A-level system, a typical university-bound student would also only take three A-levels.

Are they taking a broader mix of subjects? It is not clear yet. When the schools and colleges taking part in the survey were asked if they had encouraged students to take subjects from contrasting disciplines, 8.2 per cent replied "yes, definitely" and 44.4 per cent "yes, generally" but 42.4 per cent said they were "neutral". A lot of anecdotal evidence from schools implies that students are choosing subjects to study at AS which they think might be easier or which are only available in the sixth form.

But some question whether we should be forcing breadth on sixth formers anyway. Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at Liverpool University, says: "It seems entirely reasonable to me that they should be able to choose what they want to study. We are trying to enable people to take more control over their lives so they should be able to study what they want."

Professor Smithers believes that although Curriculum 2000 was one of the better reforms of the Blair government, the assessment demands which have left students and schools creaking under the strain need to be re-thought. He also believes that it is "nonsense" to believe that vocational A-levels will have parity of esteem with academic ones.

"Academic A-levels are valued since they offer a direct line to university entrance. Vocational qualifications such as medicine lead to prestige jobs. Accountancy qualifications open doors. A vocational qualification is not highly regarded if it leads to a job where it does not matter whether you have it or not and it won't get you more money; it can never have the same currency as an A-level."

But the system is opening new doors for some. More students are carrying on with a modern language and there are students such as Moya Lucas (see page 2) who have picked a fourth AS-level, expecting to drop it at the end of the year, who find out they enjoy it more than one of the subjects they had intended to take to A2.

Key skills certificates have not worked out well. Many independent schools didn't offer them and state school pupils had to squeeze them into already over-worked timetables. You had the situation of students who were taking maths AS-level, and intending to take it on to A2, taking the numeracy certificate; or English students taking the communications one. Estelle Morris's reform of the reforms announced two weeks ago should stop that.

On the plus side, the Institute of Education in London has found "quantitative gains and qualitative questions" in the new system. The gains include much more time being spent on teaching. The 1998 Dearing report on sixth-form education, the source of these curriculum reforms, criticised the fact that British students generally got only 15-18 hours of taught time a week, compared with around 30 hours in France or Germany.

On the minus side, students and teachers have sagged under the assessment system. Estelle Morris is now recommending that exams are not taken in January in the first year of the sixth form, and is reminding everyone that the AS exams can be taken alongside the A2 exams in the summer term of the second year of the sixth form. She is also ensuring that in future, students won't take three exams in the same AS subject. This will avoid some of the exam timetable clashes which were so prevalent this year because of the sheer number of exams students had to take.