An article written with Mike Robinson, published in the Financial Times on 20th August 1996.

To read the full text please click on Maths crisis which will take you to the Britain Watch website.

A paper written in December 1990 for a Gresham College Conference.

It shows the importance of high standards in teaching and learning and the way to achieve them.

To read the text please click on the link More Matter Less Art which will take you to the paper on the Britain Watch website.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 6th July 1990.

There is a simple and cost-effective way of stopping the decline in academic standards described by George Walden (article, July 3rd).

That is to set up, with government backing for the idea, a new “hard” examination board, whose first job would be to re-institute O-level and A-level exams at the standards which existed only three or four years ago.  If this is not done, and quickly, Gresham’s law of educational currency will rule: those boards such as AEB leading the way in softening standards, will force down the standards of other boards trying to hold the line.

For schools to opt for the new board would be the exact counterpart of the decision to opt out of local authority management.  Indeed, without such a board, opting out will not bring the benefits the Government wants.

Pace Mr Walden, I know of plenty of people who would help Mr McGregor bypass the present educationalist establishment and start Britain on the way back to proper educational standards in our schools.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 9th June 1988.

Your report (June 7th) that the Government is likely to reject the Higginson Committee’s recommendations to abolish A-levels in favour of another soft option is very welcome news.  Every major change in education of the last 30 years, down to and including the substitution of GCSE for GCE, has had as its principal though undisclosed objective the mitigation of failure.

What is so puzzling in all this is that the Government, with its crusade for competitive achievement, should continue to seek advice from those who are opposed to just about everything it stands for in this regard.  As with the report on national testing, a committee set up to do one thing reports in virtually the opposite sense.

It may however be further asked why the Government does not simply privatise the examining boards – there are enough of them.  Some boards could then continue to offer O-level examinations, for which there is a clear demand, both at home and overseas, incidentally; those boards which wished to develop for some schools a sub A-level system of the Higginson Committee type would then be free to do so.  Private institutions like the Royal Society of Arts have set highly regarded examinations responsive to demand for years; application of the principle to schools’ examinations would be a real extension of consumer choice in education.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 18th October 1986.

Your headline “University call for scrapping of A-levels” (Oct. 14th) should not be allowed to pass without comment.  First, Mr Maurice Shock was giving his personal view, not that of the University academic community, which, on the whole I would guess, takes the view that the present A-level examinations and syllabuses provide a pretty good basis for the honours degree courses we have in this country.  The second point is to note the admission that the new GCSE examination will not provide an adequate basis for the A-level courses. The GCSE syllabuses and specimen exam papers confirm this anyway.

Those of us opposed to the abolition of the GCE O-level knew all along that the real target was the A-level examination (and with it degree courses as we know them); the surprise is that a Government which keeps talking about improving educational standards cannot see this real motivation behind the relentless egalitarian agitation about exams.

The A-level examination in the last bulwark against an irrevocable slide from world class standards.  Talk of widening access to universities is a simple euphemism for letting large numbers in who should not be there and who will simply pass the work of the schools into the universities.  There is not a large store of untapped talent about; certainly in the sciences and engineering, which the government is rightly keen on, university departments are stretching their admissions criteria and competing with each other for a patently limited pool of qualified entrants.  Outside technology this country is not particularly short of university graduates.  What it very much needs, on the other hand, is a considerable expansion in the supply of decently trained technicians in a wide range of industry.

Instead of so-called widening of access to universities, the Government could encourage the polytechnics to deflect their academically abler students on to degree courses in the universities and to concentrate on what many people thought they were set up to do, namely train these much needed technicians.