A booklet written for the Campaign for Real Education in January 2004.

S F Bush

To read the text please click on University Admissions and Fees which will take to the paper on the Britain Watch website.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 28th July 1994.

Nothing more greatly exposes the contentless verbiage of Tony Blair for what it is than Labour’s new policy statement on education (report, July 27th).  Declaring that “mediocrity and decline can no longer be tolerated”, it goes on to announce measures which will remove the last vestiges of international standards from our schools.

Few British people seem to realise how pathetic an examination the GCSE is in the key subjects.  As Ray Sherlock showed (In My View, July 20th), GCSE mathematics has been gutted of virtually everything recognisable as mathematics.

Labour’s proposal for abolishing A-levels and replacing them by a so-called General Certificate of Further Education, directly related to GCSE, will complete the destruction of school mathematics, physics and chemistry, long sought by the ignorant egalitarians who advise Labour politicians.

If Mr Blair took the trouble to see what actually passes for further education in this country, he would see that the constant prattle about vocational education merely deflects attention frm the school’s abject failure properly to teach the bulk of our children the foundation elements of any education – the three Rs.

For an industrial country, no subjects are more vocational than mathematics, physics and chemistry, but only a minority of young people can do them – which is why Labour wants to destroy them.

A letter to the BBC Radio4 “PM Programme” which was read out as part of “PM letters” in July 1990.

Your item today announcing that academics and educationalists preferred so-called “balanced science” to teaching physics and chemistry, begs the question as to who these academics are.  I believe I speak for many academics in science and engineering who view “balanced science” with horror.  Physics and chemistry are difficult and demanding disciplines and as such are the foundations of modern science and technology.  “Balanced science” on the other hand is in danger of becoming a hoch-potch of ideas which will leave the average and below average pupil knowing nothing of any real use.

Just as bad, “balanced science” will deny the abler child the opportunity to learn properly the great laws of science, thus completely undermining A-levels, which of course is many educationalists’ fervent wish.  Parents should demand that their schools offer physics and chemistry as separate subjects and not be fobbed off with the specious arguments of educational advisers, few if any of whom have a proper qualification in science anyway.

A letter to the Times which was published on 10th July 1990.

James Cornford, director of the Institute for Policy Research, calls for the abolition of A-levels in favour of a single qualification at 18 for all.  Here is yet one more shot in the ceaseless agitation to destroy what remains of academic education in British schools.

A levels are not “narrow”, nor are high achievers “confined to three A-levels” since many will have taken nine or ten GCSEs and the A-level general paper.  In fact, of course, A-levels are not attacked because they are narrow, but because they are difficult and only a minority of people can tackle them.

In the sciences, knowledge and undersanding of the fundamental laws of physics and chemistry, and the concepts and operations of mathematics, as presently covered by the A-level science syllabuses, constitute the broadest, indeed the only secure and practical foundation for absorbing and initiating technological change over a life-time’s career.

The fact that this work has been done up to now in the sixth form rather than at university is the reason why this country has produced engineering and science graduates at 21 who can hold their own academically with the products of foreign systems who are two to three years older.

Only a small minority of our population, or any country’s population, will ever have the inclination and ability to follow this path.  And indeed no country’s economy will ever require more than a small minority of its workforce to be scientists and engineers.  But the quality of this small minority is absolutely critical to any country’s industrial success.

No able youngster could endure the mish-mash of pseudo-courses on “careers guidance”, social “sciences”, “community-based” projects and the like advocated by Mr Cornford’s institute in its latest offering.  Good students want to get on and tackle real subjects.  If denied this opportunity many would drop out or go abroad to seek a decent education.

You could not find a better prescription for restless boredom and disruption in our schools than to subject 16-18 year-olds of all abilities to Mr Cornford’s prescriptions.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published in early November 1989.

Your report (Oct. 28th) suggests that Kingshurst City Technology College is not to offer A-level courses because they are alleged to be “too narrow” for middle and lower ability children.  This is still further evidence, if any were needed, of the all-pervasive egalitarianism which is embedded in the administration of our State education.

Kingshurst’s Principal, Mrs Valerie Bragg, demands: “Universities will in future have to broaden their entry requirements”.  But “broaden” is a euphemism for “lower”, just as “narrow” is a euphemism for “hard”.

In fact colleges of further education all over the country find no difficulty in offering the important BTec courses for less able students which Mrs Bragg refers to alongside their A-level courses.  So why should Kingshurst find it so difficult?

Parents of Kingshurst children should realise that the International Baccalaureat which Kingshurst intends to offer is, compared with our own British A-levels in physics, chemistry and mathematics, a much inferior qualification.  It will require students wanting to enter a good university science or engineering course to do a preparatory year, as in fact Continental students on our engineering courses do at present.

Parents should ask for A-level courses and not allow themselves to be bamboozled by educational administrators and their industrialist advisers, many of whom may not have opened a textbook in 20 years, or even looked at the examination papers they so freely criticize.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 7th March 1989.

The Government rejected the Higginson report’s recommendation to substitute five so-called leaner A-levels for the current three full A-levels in the sixth form because it saw rightly that whatever protective words might be used (“rigorous”, “academically demanding”) it would be a precipitous fall in standards.

It would simply pass the work of the schools to the universities and require, in the science subjects and engineering, a general extension to four-year courses: that is, an immediate rise in the cost of university education by a third.

Instead of focusing on the supposed lack of breadth in sixth-form teaching, Mr Marriott (letter, Mar. 1st) and his colleagues in the Head Masters’ Conference should leave A-levels alone and recognise that the problem starts much earlier in state schools with their exaggerated emphasis on pointless project work and creativity for pupils barely able to read or write.

Many sixth formers do not so much lack breadth as any knowledge of their own language, their history and the geography of the world, as so tellingly pointed out by Christopher Andrew (article, Feb 28th).

Children of a wide range of abilities can learn about these three essential basics of a broad education, but they need to be taught and tested objectively in public examinations.  Until the shallow ideology which rejects didactic instruction and self-discipline is swept out of our educational system, none of the ills identifield by the Inspectorate will ever be healed.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published around the 3rd December 1986.

Your educational correspondent, David Walker, needs to learn a few facts about foreign educational systems before he extols their virtues.  For instance, American public high school education is widely regarded there as a disaster.  Talk about their breadth and lack of specialization is the merest tommy rot: lack of anything would be nearer the mark in many cases.  The result is patent – American university faculties and laboratories full of the products of other countries’ education systems, especially our own.  So far as Japan is concerned its later secondary and tertiary system is atually more specialized that our own at comparable levels of attainment.

Breadth and attainment level in fact must be looked at together.  Thus if you examine the content of the 18+ French Baccalaureat or German Abitur examinations you find that their vaunted breadth is at a level which, particularly in the sciences and mathematics, is basically O-level.  Of course only a minority anyway of French and German children pass the examination sufficiently well to go on to university successfully, just as only a minority pass a broad range of O-levels adequately in this country.  The difference is that in Britain, basically that same minority does it at 15 or 16 and goes on to study in school three or four subjects at a level which in other countries is carried out at university.  It is this efficiency which is the reason why our country produces honours degree graduates at 21 who can hold their own with the products of foreign systems who are two to three years older.  It is the current inefficiency of their system which is causing the French Government to tighten entry standards to their universities by insisting on a closer match between school and specialist university subject choices.

There is actually no conflict between maintaining A-level and university standards and seeing that the below average part of the population get a decent school education and a work related follow-up, which is what Lord Young’s YTS certificates represent.  What is needed is a disciplined effort in the schools to match the efficiency of the A-level system at lower levels, not to wreck the one part of the system which is genuinely world class.  The no-fail philosophy of the GCSE is hardly a prescription for taking on the Germans or the Japanese.

There is nothing highfaluting about academic standards, particularly in the technical sphere.  As Correlli Barnett has analysed in “Collapse of British Power”, it was the Victorian cult of the “practical man””, bereft of theoretical knowledge, which bears a major responsiblity for the pathetic state of British industry in 1914, from which it has never completely recovered.

A letter to the Reading Chronicle which was published on 18th November 1969.

Mr Hannis in last Friday’s “Chronicle” asserts that my figures on the GCE performance of school leavers are wrong, taking as evidence the oft-quoted Pedley book on comprehensive schools and a recent speech by Lord Butler.  I cannot speak for Lord Butler, but unlike Mr Hannis I had before writing looked up the figures in the Department of Education and Science’s official Statistics of Education.

For 1967 (the latest available, 1966 figures are similar) tables 14 and 16 give five or more O-levels or CSE grade 1 as follows: for comprehensive  schools 10,320 out of 76,750 leavers, or 13.5 per cent, and for all other maintained schools 86,500 out of 474,620 leavers or 18.2 per cent.  Table 18 gives two or more A-levels as follows: for comprehensive schools 5,110 or 6.7 per cent and for all other maintained schools 45,890 or 9.7 per cent.  In his book (p. 95) Pedley in fact acknowledges the poor academic performance of comprehensive schools so far and attributes this to the substantial number of newly-formed comprehensive schools.  There is clearly something in this, but I have quoted the figures to show that the case for comprehensive schools is not, to say the least, made out and that there are significant pointers against the effectiveness of comprehensive education, particularly from abroad.

Thus in the case of the USA, if Mr Clifton (last Friday) would be satisfied with an academic performance which out of 11 Western countries placed his country bottom by a wide margin (T Husen, International Study of Achievement in Mathematics 1967) and which produced in California only a few teachers apparently able to deal with simple arithmetic (D A Pidgeon, Educational Research 1959), I would not be.  In some senses formal academic education in the USA only begins at 18, and in recognition of its comparative failure, some authorities, e.g. Dr Koerner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) are actively considering forms of State-maintained selective schooling.

The USA owes its prodigious wealth, not to its formal educational system (it is in fact heavily dependent on the products of European selectively educated talent) but to its great natural resources and to the spirit of enterprise and hard work of its people, neither of which latter attributes is exactly stressed by the comprehensive principle.  In fact, in my experience, the spectacle of comprehensively and permissively educated American youth is probably the principal factor in inducing British scientists and engineers and their families to return to this country.

In some parts of the country, where for example there are small numbers of children, comprehensive schools, provided they adhere to scholastic discipline, will probably make the best use of limited educational resources.  What the proponents of comprehensive education, aided and abetted by a dictatorial Labour government, will not admit is that academic standards are crucial, and that our selective system has set levels which are outstandingly good by any standards.

Councillor Towner’s remark implying that examinations at 11 to predict the suitability of a child for different forms of education are unreliable is quite untrue.  Thus recent large-scale investigations (by e.g. the National Foundation for Education Research) showed an error of about 5 per cent in placing candidates and the errors were confined to borderline cases which could be easily remedied by transfer.  In fact many comprehensive schools administer just such tests on admission, for streaming purposes; others however wait a year or two before streaming.