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.
This isn’t really about pupils.
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