It’s the third Thursday in August, so it must be A-Levels day. The annual rituals are now well-established: From before dawn, newspaper columnists and education experts have taken their places in television and radio studios for the annual “Dumbing Down Debate” (more of a pantomime, really – “Oh yes they are!” - “Oh, no they’re not!”). Many will not have waited for the actual results, and already published their denunciation of the quality of exams in the weekend press. Others will wait until tomorrow to dust off tired clichés about how the “all-must-have-prizes” mentality is “devaluing” the “gold standard”.
Proper analysis of the results inevitably gets rather buried by the flurry of pictures of grinning, leaping teenagers (do drama students rehearse for it?). However, it is worth looking beyond the overall pass rate at the trends which the national data from the Joint Council for Qualifications reveals. For the second year running, there has been an increase in the number of students taking science and maths subjects, whilst as a percentage of the overall exam entries they have remained fairly constant. This is welcome news for manufacturers in dire need of such skills, and there are encouraging signs in the AS figures that the numbers will continue to increase next year. But there is a long way to go to reverse the decline that these subjects have suffered in recent decades, and at this rate it will take a long while to return even to the levels of ten years ago.
Of more concern this year is the large number of students who will fail to find a place at university due to the increased demand outstripping the funded places available. The Government announced just 10,000 extra places as an emergency measure, and failed to provide the extra teaching funds even for these. As a result, many leading universities have refused to take up their extra allocation, believing that the quality of courses would suffer if existing funds have to be spread more thinly. A big risk in the current recession is that companies will lose vital skills when they are forced to lay off staff. It is an equal danger now that young people interested in studying subjects vital to the economy are also being lost as they fail to find university places.
The Higher Education Minister David Lammy has today said disappointed students “shouldn’t panic” and that there is “a broad range of options open to them including clearing, reapplying for next year or seeking work experience “. Whilst there are of course valuable alternatives, how many potential engineers and high-skilled workers can we afford to see spending the next year backpacking round the world, flipping burgers, or enrolling on other degrees instead?