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.