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.

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.