After 13 years in power, the Conservatives have decided to rebrand themselves as the ‘party of change’. Today, Rishi Sunak announced that the Tories will ban smoking for the next generation, scrap a significant portion of HS2, and abolish A-levels and T-levels in favour of new ‘Advanced British Standards’. Rishi Sunak is no longer ‘Inaction Man’, but ‘Over-reaction Man’
While it is encouraging to see the government finally being proactive rather than reactive on education policy, the government will have to put its money where its mouth is if it wants to prove that this is more than a headline-grabbing pre-election gimmick. A British Baccalaureate is not a new idea; dozens of education committees and thinktanks have recommended a broader post-16 curriculum since David Miliband first co-authored a paper on the subject in 1990. What is new is the current teacher recruitment and retention crisis, which means that the government wants to introduce radical systemic changes when this year it only recruited half the number of needed secondary school teachers.
Perhaps the Tories know they could be walking away from the game soon
There are four key factors supposedly driving this reform. The first is to ensure students study a wider range of subjects. It is true that the narrowness of A-levels make us international outliers: most A-level students currently only study three subjects, whereas across the OECD, students typically study around seven. There is an argument that this early specialisation closes off students’ options, and that the changing world of work – where young people are far more likely to change careers – requires more flexibility and creativity. Yet our university system depends on this in-depth preparation at sixth form: most undergraduate courses in England are three years, whereas bachelor degrees in the US, Canada, Spain and South Korea (where sixth formers take at least five to seven subjects) are all four years long. Universities will also have to adapt their courses if schools prioritise breadth over depth.
The second reason is to increase quality teaching time. Currently, the government funds 16-19 providers for about 640 hours of structured time per year, or 17 hours per week, which is less than Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Italy and Canada. In France, students get over 1,700 hours over two years. This is particularly problematic for disadvantaged students, who may have fewer resources for independent study, and so need the structure and stability of more contact time. Yet the only way the government is going to be able to deliver on its promise of an extra 195 hours for students (equivalent to two and a half hours per week) is by recruiting more teachers: something which it has repeatedly failed to do. As Sam Freedman, former senior policy advisor to Michael Gove, wrote: ‘There’s no point designing new qualifications – however good they are – if there’s no one there to teach them, and no resources to teach them with.’
The third reason is to embed a core of essential knowledge, by ensuring all students take some form of Maths and English until they are 18. A noble pursuit in theory, but if we want a more literate and numerate society then we have to ensure that pupils can pass the basics first. Last year 167,000 students failed GCSE Maths and 172,000 failed GCSE English Language: the highest number in a decade. Only around 16 per cent of pupils who resit GCSE Maths and a quarter who resit GCSE English Language will go on to pass. Given that only six in ten pupils will achieve a ‘Good Pass’ (level 5) in English and Maths, surely we should be focusing on plugging the attainment gaps between Key Stages 1-4 first?
Finally, the government says that it wants to deliver genuine parity of esteem between technical and academic routes. More vocational options are too-often looked at as lower-class: anyone who works in a school will tell you that ‘BTEC’ has become slang for ‘inferior’ (I once heard a student say that ‘Kingston Carnival is just a BTEC Notting Hill’, for example). By merging A-levels and T-levels, and therefore removing the artificial divide between academic and technical routes, pupils can take a more creative and dynamic combination of subjects, and hopefully ensure quality: the current system is hopelessly messy, with around 7,000 different qualifications at level 3 or below. This is a welcome change, but a rather frustrating one, given that the government just spent £1 billion on creating and implementing T-levels to replace BTECs, and schools are still getting to grips with what could be a short-term system.
The government has admitted that these changes will take up to a decade to come into effect, and given that we are, at most, a year or so away from an election, then it feels like this could be the right idea at the wrong time. Perhaps the Tories know they could be walking away from the game soon, and so have laid their cards on the table with no intention of actually playing their hand; perhaps therefore the more pertinent question is, what will Labour do with this information? They have generically promised a full ‘review of curriculum and assessment’, but Starmer will have to do more to prove he is ‘Actionable Man’ first.
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