Leading Article: Reasons to be cheerful

With the new term approaching, it is time to make a calmer assessment of the lessons learnt from this year's exam season. For the most part, they are encouraging. More youngsters are studying the traditional separate sciences at GCSE; A-levels will be tougher for candidates next year, with students' thinking skills being stretched through more open-ended questions; and boys are finally beginning to catch up (and even overtake girls in maths, thanks to the abandonment of coursework).

Oh, and there have been the usual record pass rates in top grades in both GCSEs and A-levels.

Some worries persist. Modern languages continue their inexorable decline at GCSE; Oxford and Cambridge have turned away more than 12,000 candidates predicted to get three straight As at A-level; and – more tragically – thousands of university hopefuls have been left without a place – and face looking for a job amid the ravages of the recession.

All in all, though, it has not been a good summer for the end-of-civilisation-as-we-know-it brigade. We could even be permitted a glimmer of hope that the reform of A-levels might go some way to restoring the exam to the high esteem that it once enjoyed.