Rishi Sunak’s exam shake-up doesn’t add up

After 13 years in power, the Conservatives have decided to rebrand themselves as the ‘party of change’. Today, Rishi Sunak announced that the Tories will ban smoking for the next generation, scrap a significant portion of HS2, and abolish A-levels and T-levels in favour of new ‘Advanced British Standards’. Rishi Sunak is no longer ‘Inaction Man’, but ‘Over-reaction Man’

While it is encouraging to see the government finally being proactive rather than reactive on education policy, the government will have to put its money where its mouth is if it wants to prove that this is more than a headline-grabbing pre-election gimmick. A British Baccalaureate is not a new idea; dozens of education committees and thinktanks have recommended a broader post-16 curriculum since David Miliband first co-authored a paper on the subject in 1990. What is new is the current teacher recruitment and retention crisis, which means that the government wants to introduce radical systemic changes when this year it only recruited half