One of this week’s most important stories is tucked away in the Times’ Higher Education supplement today. It appears that one of Michael Gove’s most important reforms, putting universities—not Whitehall—in charge of A-levels, is being reversed.
The article reports that the A Level Content Advisory Board (ALCAB), which was meant to check on A-levels annually, ‘is to be registered as a dormant company after it was informed by the Department for Education that it would not receive any more substantive work until at least 2017, when the first students will sit the reformed A-levels.’
Now, the Department for Education is claiming that the ALCAB has simply completed its work for the moment. A DfE spokesman told me, ‘We will continue to involve universities in A-level reform. We asked the A Level Content Advisory Board to provide advice on subject content for maths and further maths, foreign languages and geography A-levels, and it successfully completed this work.’
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