Peter Hoskin

Gove calls on universities to improve A-levels

It may be a sleepy day in Westminster, but Michael Gove and his school reforms have lost none of their brilliant urgency. The schools secretary has today written to Ofqual — the body in charge of regulating the exams system — to ask that universities be allowed to involve themselves, much more closely than ever before, in designing and implementing A-levels. In the letter he sums up his plans thus:

‘I want to see new arrangements that allow Awarding Organisations to work with universities to develop qualifications in a way that is unconstrained — as far as possible — by centrally determined criterion.’

And he adds that this process should eventually allow ‘universities, not Awarding Organisations, to drive the system.’

This makes a great deal of sense. After all, the decline in exam standards is no

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