Is now really the time to scrap A-levels?

The history of education reform is a graveyard of acronyms: TVEIs, GNVQs and so on. There have been many well-meaning initiatives that made sense at the time but struggled to gain acceptance. Rishi Sunak needs to proceed with caution before he launches into yet another reform of school qualifications, especially if it means the end of the only one that has stood the test of time: the A-level.

The Prime Minister’s concern – shared by many educationalists – is that A-levels are too narrow and specialised and lead to too many people entering adult life lacking adequate literacy and numeracy skills. In the Survey of Adult Skills conducted by the OECD, England not only scored poorly in literacy and numeracy; it was also the only country where 16- to 24-year-olds performed less well than 55- to 64-year-olds in both. It is a rather damning indictment of the past 40 years of school exam reforms.

In fact, A-levels were introduced in 1951 with the aim of avoiding premature specialisation in the sixth form. Yet Britain is now nearly alone in the developed world in not making literacy and numeracy compulsory subjects up to the end of the school years. There have been various attempts to broaden education, such as the introduction of AS-levels, which it was hoped would lead to more students studying four or five subjects in the lower sixth.

But not only have AS-levels fallen into obscurity; the average number of A–level subjects taken is now decreasing. Seven years ago, 7.6 per cent of A-level pupils studied four subjects. By 2020 that had fallen to 4.4 per cent. Pupils are told by universities they are judged only on the top three.

As a result of the recent grade inflation (whereby A*s and As were given to the top 44 per cent of entries, later lowered to 27 per cent), the system looks a mess.