The Guardian view on A-levels: end the guesswork in university admissions

This week’s A-level results will have disappointed some students, but despite that there may in one sense never be a better time to be a UK teenager who wants to go on to higher education. It is true that unlike previous generations they will be saddled with debts and repayments of one type or another. But the recent massive expansion in higher education, unleashed by the government’s reforms in 2015 allowing unlimited recruitment, as well as the lack of alternatives and the decline in the number of school leavers, means that for now and the next two or three years, sixth formers clutching A-level certificates and equivalent qualifications will be in high demand.

A symptom of that demand are the generous offers being made by institutions to attract students at all stages of the admissions process. Since cutting tuition fees puts off students fearing a cut-price education, universities are instead offering incentives in various forms, as well as offering bursaries to support those students whose family circumstances mean they would otherwise be unable to afford to go. Hence the record numbers of applicants from so-called low-participation neighbourhoods, to use the sector’s obscure proxy for measuring disadvantage.

But the current shortage of students obscures a major flaw in the pipeline from school to campus: the UK’s outdated insistence on conducting applications and admissions without knowing a candidate’s final exam results. England, Wales and Northern Ireland are alone among developed countries in not only having school leavers make applications but also accepting offers before they have sat their exams, let alone seen the results. It’s not enough to say that if the system isn’t broken it doesn’t need fixing, because it is broken. The evidence is the bureaucratic scaffolding that has been erected purely to work around the lack of exam results. First come the grade predictions made by teachers – these are risibly unreliable but they set the boundaries of where students apply, exacerbating inequality. Then there is the growth in unconditional offers, which overcome the instability of the system by ignoring exam results entirely but are said to downgrade the importance of the exams. And finally there is the do-over required for all those grade predictions that failed, known as “clearing”, an ironic title given that it is a symptom of the lack of clarity. All of these would be swept away by post-qualification applications, and they would not be missed.

What to put in its place? There are two straightforward options that would require major surgery. One is to emulate Scotland and reintroduce the halfway AS-level scrapped by Michael Gove as education secretary, and allow those to be used as a better guide. The other is to move A-level exams earlier in the year, to March or April. Then the results would be published during termtime, with sixth formers using the intervening period to research possible choices, assisted by school staff able to aid those from disadvantaged backgrounds. This would not be enough time under the Ucas system, but that dates from 1961, before the digitisation of the world.

Other countries avoid these difficulties because they have education systems that don’t insist on 16- and 17-year-olds making definitive choices in a narrow range of subjects to study and then propel them into choosing overly specialised courses from their first day as undergraduates. That is a wider issue, but for now let us reform the admissions process, as Labour has suggested. There could not be a better time now that student numbers are low.