The trouble with GCSEs

The system of testing all pupils at 16 will have to end eventually, the new chief exams adviser, David Hargreaves, tells Judith Judd

Just days after his appointment as the Government's chief exams adviser, Professor David Hargreaves caused anxious flutterings among his new bosses. A Government which likes to exercise ferocious control over spin and the causes of spin, was not pleased to be reminded in an article in the educational trade press that the maverick professor had once advocated the abolition of a 16-plus school leaving exam. Such radical stuff was not what a cautious Downing Street wanted to hear but Hargreaves' many fans were delighted - and astonished - by the decision to offer him one of education's top jobs. One inquirer who asked David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Education, how he had managed to push through the appointment is said to have received the terse response: "Brute force".

Just days after his appointment as the Government's chief exams adviser, Professor David Hargreaves caused anxious flutterings among his new bosses. A Government which likes to exercise ferocious control over spin and the causes of spin, was not pleased to be reminded in an article in the educational trade press that the maverick professor had once advocated the abolition of a 16-plus school leaving exam. Such radical stuff was not what a cautious Downing Street wanted to hear but Hargreaves' many fans were delighted - and astonished - by the decision to offer him one of education's top jobs. One inquirer who asked David Blunkett, the Secretary of State for Education, how he had managed to push through the appointment is said to have received the terse response: "Brute force".

Hargreaves, the new chief executive of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, first advocated the end of a 16-plus exam in 1982 after he had been called in by the Inner London Education Authority to help improve its secondary schools. He still believes that the GCSE exam for all at the age of 16 will have to go eventually but not until vocational GCSEs have established themselves as a credible alternative. "I remain concerned that GCSE is still seen as a terminal exam for secondary school and particularly for kids who are turned off by education. What happens at 16 has to be seen as a stepping-stone. At the moment we are losing one-in-four young people."

For bright pupils, the exam's importance will diminish, he believes, as increasing numbers take it earlier. "I am massively supportive of early entry. The earlier pupils take exams the more likely they are to move on."

His own experience proves that accelerating pupils works, he argues. Like Mr Blunkett, he is a working-class lad from the north. His parents left school when they were 12: his father was a semi-skilled worker at an aircraft factory. He was a scholarship boy at Bolton School, a direct grant grammar school, in Bolton, Lancashire. His parents assumed that he would leave at 16 after taking O-levels. "In fact, I took my O-levels at 14 and my A-levels at 16." He went on to Cambridge to study theology and then psychology.

After Cambridge he taught RE and English at Hull grammar school before a research job at Manchester University where he embarked on the study of "Lumley", a Salford secondary modern, a universally acclaimed ground-breaking book. Instead of observing the school from the outside, Hargreaves' research involved long talks with the boys themselves. He earned a reputation as a champion of social justice and the disaffected; concerns, he says, which he has never lost. In his ILEA report, he concluded that disaffected working-class pupils should be offered short modules to motivate them instead of traditional exam courses. "I think what has driven me is the boys I studied in Lumley in the Sixties. For many of those lads, the world has not changed in 40 years. I am driven by a concern for the underachieving, alienated, the potential underclass."

Others argue that the Hargreaves' philosophy is more complicated, that he is a mercurial character who has moved steadily to the right. More recently, he has argued for specialist schools and diversity rather than all-in comprehensives, and has angered some colleagues in his last job as head of Cambridge University's department of education by backing "teaching schools", like teaching hospitals, to train teachers rather than university-based training. He also attacked current educational research, compared it unfavourably with medical research and said that it should be more relevant to the classroom. The last two are views he shares with Chris Woodhead, the chief inspector of schools.

The left-leaning professor and the combative chief inspector, were colleagues in Oxford University's department of education where Hargreaves went from Manchester. Friends say they got on well and one recalls Hargreaves praising Woodhead as "the cleverest man in Oxford". This week, though, Hargeaves was disagreeing publicly with Woodhead, who thinks exam standards are falling.

At Oxford, he visited local schools, charming teachers. He wrote a book about comprehensive schools, described sniffily by one don as "intellectual journalism". The fact that some educationists see the book as an even-handed look at comprehensives and others as an attack on them shows how difficult Hargreaves is to pigeonhole.

He says: "I don't belong to a political party. I have never been terribly good at conforming to a party line. My thinking is too anarchic. I have adapted to the changing world. My views about education have changed but they have not moved from left to right."

He wants the authority to be a powerhouse of ideas and an efficient regulator of exams. "If we are to survive in a knowledge economy," he argues, "we need to bring formal education much closer to the world of work."

He is 61, unmarried, and an enthusiastic supporter of the arts, particularly 20th-century music, Thirties etchings and modern painting. How will a man more accustomed to high table talk than high-level politics cope with a management role? "A great dinner party companion," says one social acquaintance, "but I can't imagine him managing anything."

Hargreaves points out that he will actually be managing fewer people in his new job (500) than he did at ILEA (600). One critic (and he has very few), who admits to "envious admiration" says that, far from being an unworldy academic he "has a taste for power and publicity similar to Woodhead's". Many hope that he will use his independent thinking to challenge the Government and to carve out a new role for the QCA, which has found it hard to establish itself against the centralising might of New Labour. One academic says: "This is a defining moment for the authority. It was very important to appoint someone who is a thinker. They could have chosen someone who was a quisling or a conformist."

Those who knew Hargreavesat ILEA are confident that he will be neither. "A terrific chief inspector. Some of the politicians weremade very uncomfortable because he wouldn't back down. He won'tsee it as his job to duck and weave,"says one. "A man of principle,"says another.

He says: "I stood up to the politicians in ILEA and I may have to do it again but I think politicians understand that I have that role."

He and Bill Stubbs, the authority's chairman, worked together in ILEA where the latter was chief education officer. They were, say former colleagues, a formidable partnership. Mr Blunkett should take note.