A new consensus: A levels ARE less valuable

nick cowen, 19 July 2007

When the Civitas report on Blair’s failure to improve education over the last decades was released, Jim Knight MP squared off against Robert Coe, whose work we have cited, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme (approximately 12 minutes in from the beginning). To the whole nation, he denied that exams had got any easier during Labour’s time in government and that an A level today had exactly the same value as a decade earlier. Perhaps he had no other choice but to take this line. The dramatic rise in exam results had to be due to the prudent stewardship of New Labour’s education reforms. What a difference a couple of weeks make! Now a new government adviser acknowledges that A levels have lost value at least in his area of Physics and Maths.

But note how the argument has shifted once this claim is acknowledged. No longer is it denied that exam results have less value than before, only that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Easier exams give pupils a greater sense of achievement and they demonstrate that teachers are better at preparing students for exams. We may well dispute these claims too, for different reasons, but that isn’t the argument that we originally made.
Our main contention was with this simple argument
1. If exam results improve, Government reforms are a success and we need more of them
2. Exam results have improved
Therefore:
3. The Government reforms are a success and we need more of them
All we have done is collapse the first premise. An improvement in exam results means: exam results have improved – nothing more. We have shown that there is no real link between better exam results and actual higher achievement by students, pupils or government policy. They are poor performance indicators.
So if the government wishes to continue and even extend its centralising reform agenda, it needs to offer some other evidence that it is working. Instead, somehow the assumption that these reforms (especially academies) must be a blessing has sneaked back into the consensus even as everyone has come to accept that the foundation of that claim (better exam results equal better education) has proved fallacious.
Until those in power challenge this assumption, there is no chance of tackling the genuine flaws in our education system.