AS-levels and A-levels

Pat Glass Excerpts

Tuesday 16th April 2013 Westminster Hall

[Pat Glass (North West Durham) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dobbin. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) on securing the debate.

I shall not speak at length—I am sure hon. Members will be pleased. I have concerns about the separation of AS and A-levels, and about the Government’s proposals, but I would refer those issues to the voices of those who know more about those things than I do. I understand that in the recent Government consultation 77% of those who responded were against the proposals. The 24 Russell Group universities, college and school lecturers, and teachers and head teachers are all warning about not only the proposals but the time scale. My concerns are about the changes, but also their implementation in 2015 at the same time as proposed changes to GCSEs and to the school accountability system. That will put pressure not only on exam boards, teachers and colleges, but, most importantly, on young people—the students.

Like other hon. Members, I am concerned about jeopardising fair access and the progress, however limited, that has been made with that, about undermining the progress of the most able students and about risks to the integrity of curriculum development from key stage 2 up to key stages 4 and 5, and beyond. However, in the short remarks that I will make today, I want to draw on the work of the Select Committee on Education. We recently carried out a quite detailed inquiry into what happened with the changes to GCSE English in 2012. I shall not go into the details today, because a report may be published in due course, but I want to take the opportunity to impress on the Minister the importance of learning lessons from what happened.

The hon. Member for Bradford East (Mr Ward) probably made the most useful contribution to the inquiry when he said that we do our young people no favours when we refuse to listen to the voices of warning. Those voices were crying out to us long before the changes in 2012; we simply did not listen. Because they were not what politicians wanted to hear, they were ignored. We therefore reached the awful situation in which hundreds of thousands of young people did exactly what they were told they needed to do to get the qualifications that were so important to them, but failed to gain what was promised to them.

The proposals have been called rushed and incoherent by those whom the Government should listen to. I accept that there is a need for regular change and reform in the education system—I endorse that view. We need constant reform and change, not least because, whatever we put in place, teachers are very clever and will find a way to game it. The Department must constantly move, change and reform. However, we very often hear the Secretary of State telling us that he believes in the changes. He talks about his belief, and no one can deny that he has conviction; but such important changes should be based not on belief but on evidence, and, so far, whether in the debate or in any of the papers that I have looked at, I have found no sound evidence to serve as a basis for the Secretary of State’s proposals.

--- Later in debate ---

[Kevin Brennan]

The hon. Gentleman makes my point for me. Cambridge has been the university that has most used AS-levels to bring about widening access. It can show that it has widened access as a result of them in the past 10 years. If he wants to challenge the admissions tutors on the claim that they have successfully widened access through the use of AS-levels, he is free to do so. They are absolutely clear about it and say that if AS-levels disappear, university entry will become less fair. The Minister must answer that point. So far, Ministers have failed to answer it, or to explain why they are persisting with the policy.

In any case, the Government accept that Cambridge is right, and presumably that the Russell Group, the 1994 Group, Universities UK, the Association of Colleges, the Sixth Form Colleges Association, the National Union of Students, the teachers and head teachers associations and we, God forbid, are right about the usefulness of AS-levels. Nevertheless, the Government will proceed with the damaging and unnecessary divorce of AS-levels from A-levels. Like the EBacc certificates, no one supports the move. The Government quite rightly abandoned their proposals on the EBacc. The Minister might well have had an influence on that decision. Who knows? It happened to coincide with his appointment to the Department. As I said earlier, we will not proceed with the divorce of the AS-level from the A-level, and everyone should be aware of that.

[Pat Glass]

We have had people with huge expertise coming to us and saying that this is the wrong thing to do. The only other area where we have seen such an overwhelming objection has been to the proposed changes to GCSEs. I hope that the Minister will reflect on that, because the Government ultimately took the right decision in that area.

[Kevin Brennan]

My hon. Friend is right. The Secretary of State has had to issue a direction to Ofqual in relation to this proposal, because everyone thinks that it is nonsense, and it was confirmed in parliamentary answers to me that he had to issue a direction. On 31 January, I tabled a parliamentary question to ask what assessment Ministers had made of the recent Cambridge university admissions research working party study of AS-level as a predictor, and the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for South West Norfolk, said that she had “reflected on” the study. So, she had reflected on it and she agreed that AS-levels were

“a useful aid for university admissions”.—[Official Report, 31 January 2013; Vol. 557, c. 887W.]

So the Government agree with everybody that AS-levels are a “useful aid” for admissions. They know what the research is, and they have reflected on it.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister for Schools (Mr David Laws)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dobbin.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Feltham and Heston (Seema Malhotra) on securing the debate and on putting her case so clearly and in such a measured way. I am also pleased that we have had useful and helpful contributions from a number of other Members, including members of the Education Committee.

A lot of the contributions have pointed out that some of the proposals that we are discussing are controversial, and clearly they are. We are aware of a lot of the feedback that has come in from different organisations. Sometimes when Governments go out to consultation on particular proposals, they realise that they have made mistakes and they change the proposals. As a number of Members have indicated, we did that on the reforms to GCSEs that we had proposed, but I should say to those Members who have at times today suggested that popularity is the benchmark for introducing policies and the ultimate test that there are many other examples of changes in education and in other Government policy areas where proposals were extremely controversial at the time—I am thinking of key stage 2 national tests, the introduction of Ofsted and sponsored academies—and not welcomed by many in the relevant sector when they were introduced that have proven to be generally very successful and which are now welcomed. The consensus changes.

If we wanted an example of what happens when policy is introduced just on the basis of what is popular with the sector, we have Wales to look at. Wales has introduced, over time, many policies that were extremely popular in the sector, but which have proven, in many cases, to do huge damage to the quality of education in Wales. That is now widely and internationally recognised.

[Pat Glass]

Does the Minister accept that although those controversial reforms that he mentioned, such as the introduction of Ofsted and key stage 2 tests, may have been unpopular with some people working in education, there was nevertheless a body of evidence to support their introduction? Therefore, although they were perhaps controversial, there was huge evidence behind them, and they have subsequently proven the evidence.

[Mr Laws]

That was not said by many of the opponents of those proposals at the time. Actually, many opponents, including to sponsored academies, continue to maintain today that there is no evidence to show the success of those policies, so I do not agree with the hon. Lady that the issue is as simple as that.