EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT

Hundreds of thousands of British children, including my niece, today find out the results of their A-levels, the end of school exams that provide the passport to a coveted place at University (though perhaps not so coveted any more, given that students will have to pay large tuition fees from 2012 onwards).

The results show an increase in the overall pass rate for the 29th year in a row. Furthermore, the proportion of pupils getting the top A or A* grades is 27%, though this is the first time in 14 years that that figure has not risen. That compares with a figure of under 10% for all of the years from 1960 to the late 1980's.

As a mathematician by training, such figures lead to one inescapable conclusion; British children are doing much better academically than they used to. Unfortunately, that inescapable conclusion is contradicted by a mass of other data; from employers complaining about young people's basic skills in literacy and numeracy, from international comparisons, from educational professionals and others. If this is true, then the inescapable conclusion must be replaced by another, namely that an A level is simply not as hard to get as it used to be.

I have always thought that the British system puts too much emphasis on academic qualifications, and not enough on improving the prospects for non-academic children. Other countries I have lived in (eg Denmark, Germany) certainly offer more, and more rewarding, choices for the non-academic pupil, thereby leaving academic qualifications to the truly academic. A system which gives everybody academic prizes at 18 is merely delaying the selection of the academic from the non-academic until after University; by which time everybody will have loaded up on a lot of debt. Since that selection will come eventually, I can't see that that is in the U.K.'s long-term economic or societal interests.

Walter Blotscher