A-Levels are getting easier. When people say this, it is not about criticising teachers or pupils, but the Government who have shamefully implemented a policy of dumbing down the curriculum for their own short term poilitcal gain. Worse than that, if anybody tries to criticise them over it, they have got the cheek to distract attention from what they're doing by setting the teachers and pupils against these critics, the very two groups which should by rights be on the same side.
The easiest way to settle the debate is to examine copies of the syllabus for various subjects from the last twenty years or so and the evidence is only too apparent. The Government poo-poo this evidence by misconstruing this observation as an attack on today's pupils' academic abilities. They deliberately attempt to make it appear as if their critics are suggesting that today's pupils would not have the academic ability to pass the A-levels of yesteryear. This is not what is being implied at all, and the point is that setting the level of the examination lower makes it harder for those pupils in the top percentage to really distinguish themselves from the rest of us.
This technique is typical of New Labour, which is obsessed with setting nebulous targets with dubious metrics. These systems always allow plenty of room for manipulation of any measured data and are invariably based on a percentage figure. Since this is a dimensionless ratio, all you need to do is make sure you can control both the numerator and the demonator and you have a foolproof mechanism for making it look like your policies are working far better than they actually are. However, if you turn the pages of any newspaper you will see countless articles that would seem to contradict the claims that the Education system is working so well. Every day, articles can be found reporting the increasing number of complaints from employers unable to find young people with the most basic language and arithmetic skills, or surveys that find an astonishingly high percentage of young people are spectacularly ignorant and find it difficult even to distinguish between historical facts and televisual fiction.
We're not bothered if pupils today are getting better A-level results than we did ten, fifteen or even twenty years ago, and in any case, they aren't directly competing with us in the job market. We'd all like to see the education system to improve over time, as indeed it should, and offer opportunites to an increasing number of young people. However, something doesn't quite add up here and the predictable reaction from Ministers does nothing to assure us that this is anything other than a big lie. We want and expect to see a continual improvement in A-level results, but we want to do it the right way, by actually improving things, which takes time, but is worth it in the end. It's not the same thing at all to cheat by simply lowering the bar and saying to hell with the longer term consequences.