Whatever the outcome, the new A- levels are something to celebrate after years of turbulence

This week’s A-level results will be the most significant in a generation. They represent the latest turn in a long story of changes to the qualification, which has touched an ever-larger number of students in England since the 1950s. Each change has been accompanied by disputation, but this latest most of all.

To understand both what has happened and why it has occasioned such comment, we need to go right back to those early post-war years and follow the thread through.

The A-level has been a feature of the English educational landscape since 1951, when it replaced the Higher School Certificate, itself introduced in 1918 to bring some order to chaos of school leaving examination options then available. The HSC was criticised as requiring too broad a range of subjects and thus delaying the opportunity to specialise in the humanities or the sciences.

To correct this, the new General Certificate of Education system was introduced, with Ordinary Levels (taken at 16) and Advanced Levels (at 18), which permitted students to choose a suite of subjects of interest to them.

The usual number of A-levels was three, but sometimes four, and they were sat by a tiny proportion of the population: a government report in 1954 estimated that around 17,000 children completed the qualifications the previous year; the number this week will be more than 300,000.

A-levels were from then a permanent fixture in English education; numbers taking them steadily rose, but the percentage of students getting top grades did not. This was because the grades were set arithmetically: 10 per cent of students who entered got an A-grade, 15 per cent a B-grade, and so on down to the 10 per cent who got no grade at all.

However, as time passed, this seemed unfair: standards were set by a student’s cohort, not by the quality of their achievement. A student who got an B-grade in one year might have got an A-grade in another year of less able students.

During the Thatcher years, education was substantially changed, including qualifications. A-level grades were freed from specific percentages, and instead any student who met standards decided by the examiners achieved the appropriate grade.

This seems rather more just, but the steady rise in pass rates since the 1980s led to persistent, nagging doubts: were students getting better or were the exams were getting easier?

Changes by the New Labour government at the turn of the millennium heightened such concerns. “Curriculum 2000”, as it was called, broke the A-level into half: AS-levels (standing for Advanced Supplementary) were sat at the end of the first year of the qualification, with a second set of exams sat at the end of the second year to give a full A-level.

An accompanying leap in the pass rates as the change was implemented raised eyebrows so high that the chief of the government’s qualifications watchdog was sacked in the resulting scandal about diluting standards.

But the system of “modular A-levels” carried on. By 2010, “modular GCSEs” were also available, the result of which was that many teenagers were sitting external examinations in every year from 14 to 18, and not just in the traditional Summer exam season, but in Spring too.

Repeated chances to re-take examinations were also available, consuming even more student time. The opportunity to reflect on what was being taught was lost to ever more revision and exam preparation, and the quality of learning suffered as the need for long-term memorisation of material faded away.

It was this exam factory culture of resits, revise-and-forget teaching and questionable standard-setting which led the Coalition government to intervene so firmly in the arena of qualifications.

It is worth being clear that this was very much a Coalition initiative, argued for by both Conservatives, under Education Secretary Michael Gove, and Liberal Democrats, with David Laws as Minister for Schools leading the charge in the House of Commons in defence of the new system.

The plan was that the modularity of A-levels was to end as soon as possible: the single Summer exam point would return; that has already happened. In time, the AS-level would be “decoupled” from A-levels—although students could sit AS-levels, the results could not count towards A-level outcomes, thus only the exam season at the end of the second year would really matter; this comes in for a range of subjects, including English, history and physics, this year.

This change was not without controversy. Although many university tutors were pleased to see that students would once again have two years of solid subject-specific study at A-level, uninterrupted by exam preparation and sitting, some University admissions departments, of which Cambridge was the loudest, had grown used to the AS-level system; much of their admissions process was built around the information gleaned from them.

Independent schools also voiced fears that the end of AS-levels would deter students from demanding subjects like Mathematics or modern foreign languages, when they discovered if they left the course after a year they would receive no qualification.

It remains to be seen whether these prognostications will come to pass. Certainly, the A-level was a two-year linear course for much longer than it was a two-part beast, so this system is not inherently problematic. Any reader over 35 holding an A-level will see in this year’s “new” system one near indistinguishable from their own experience.

The matter of admissions to university may occasion more comment. There was once in England a substantial lobby for universities to alter their admissions processes so they did not begin until after all students received their A-level results.

In that way, students who received unexpectedly good results could perhaps apply to more selective universities than they had originally considered.

This lobby largely vanished in the wake of Curriculum 2000, but may now make a reappearance, although the Clearing system—through which students whose grades do not meet their university offer can be matched to universities whose courses are under subscribed—now has provision for “upgrading” an offer.

Students sitting these new exams have also claimed they are “guinea pigs”, experiencing some entirely new qualifications system.

It should be clear, looking back over the history of the A-level, that this is overblown: much that is happening has happened before. It is students of my generation who were given modular A-levels and their attendant problems without asking who have the right to feel most aggrieved.

In any event, the new system has a great deal to commend it: the damaging culture of bite-sized exams which did not require, and often actively hampered, students in developing a broad understanding of their subjects are now gone.

Whatever the individual results on Thursday, that is something to celebrate.

John Blake is Head of Education and Social Reform at the think-tank Policy Exchange, before which he was a state-school history teacher for ten years.

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