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.