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 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 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 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.