A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 27th January 2004.

It was written by the Rev Lord Pilkington, Prof Stephen Bush, Antony Flew, Prof Anthony O’Hear, Dr Ruth Lea, Chris Woodhead and 11 others.

We are very concerned by the potential effect of some of the Government’s proposals for higher education on the fairness of admissions to university.  The funding mechanisms put in place, the creation of the Office of Fair Access and ministerial rhetoric about factors relating to student background all put pressure on universities to take into account factors other than academic ability when making decisions on admissions.

At the very least, a climate is being created where university applicants from certain schools and backgrounds may be left with the feeling that they are being judged other than on their merits.

We believe that fairness and high standards are best upheld if individual academic merit is the cornerstone of the university admissions system and that judging academic merit is best left to the universities, independent of financial pressure from the Government or its agencies.

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 4th May 1991.

Your editorial (April 29th) on the Labour party’s plans for a renewed egalitarian onslaught on the remnants of our academic education sysem are indeed apposite.  But as well as the dilution of content and standards you refer to, there is another insidious element in their plans which needs to be exposed.

This is to insist that all students, regardless of inclination or personal choice, should follow courses in what are laughably referred to as “core skills”, such as citizenship, personal and social education.

In other words, unless students are prepared to be indoctrinated with education shiboleths such as multiculturalism, they will be excluded altogether from higher education.  Exceptions of course will be made for those of outstanding musical and sporting talents whose governing authorities would not stand for this nonsense.

Taken together with the sheer boredom of a sixth form course which would take students to something like O-level standards at age 19 – instead of 16 only four years ago – these plans will ensure that parents of intellectually able children will struggle not so much to send them to independent schools in this country, but to schools and universities abroad.

The schools educational establishment will have achieved its long-term aim of complete disinheritance in schools of British scientific, language and historical culture.  Universities will have to do the work of the schools, but with young adults who will naturally have a grossly inflated view of their own capabilities.  We will have a Third World education system at First World prices.

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.