A-levels are far from perfect, but in the exam hall every pupil – rich or poor – is equally afraid

‘You may turn over your papers now.” For how many of us, decades after A-levels, does that phrase still cause a ripple of nerves in the stomach? Along with a large portion of the population, I have a recurring A-level anxiety dream: mine involves organic chemistry and a stack of unopened ring-binders.
It’s a cliche, of course, but peculiar perhaps to Britain. Our exams are especially high stakes. In most other rich countries, excepting America, grades matter less. French universities are mostly happy if you get your baccalaureate – the really grand ones demand extra study, but there is less emphasis on particular scores. In Germany, you need a school leaving certificate, and if you fail that you can do a foundation course to compensate. Here, though, one missed mark in a single three-hour stretch can alter the course of your life.
This strikes some as harsh – and arbitrary. On results day, there’s now a tradition for telling school leavers that grades don’t really matter. Jeremy Clarkson releases an annual statement about his C and two Us: “And here I am with my own pub.” This year a tweet from Richard Branson read: “On one of my last days at school, aged 15, my headmaster predicted that I would either end up in prison or become a millionaire… So for anyone anxious about their A-level results today, I hope this brings you some encouragement!”
The sentiment is echoed in a burst of reforming zeal that has followed botched exams in the pandemic: a cohort of politicians, teachers and business people have argued that A-levels shouldn’t matter quite as much as they do. They are too stressful, they say, too narrow, and too elitist – branding a whole group of young people as failures.
Among those reformists is Peter Hyman, now a senior adviser to Keir Starmer, who once wrote in these pages that a period of teacher assessment would be better than the high-adrenaline snapshot of exams. We should assess things like “creativity, collaboration… and communication,” he says, to give a “holistic view” of every child. This is all well-meaning stuff: exams are far from perfect. But the celebs and the reformers have it wrong. A-levels do matter. What’s more, they should. They are one of the best engines of social mobility that we have.
Branson’s tweet will after all be more encouraging to students who come from wealth. Exams matter less if your parents are rich. Branson could afford to drop out of school: his father was a barrister, his grandfather a high court judge. Clarkson’s parents, meanwhile, were able to send him to Repton. Connections, internships, social polish – private schools and networks can blunt the effect of bad grades, and money softens the fall if risky choices fail. But not everyone has this.
A more “holistic” assessment is a nice idea, but ambiguous, and therefore open to meddling by the posh. Oboe lessons, Mandarin, theatre classes, work experience with successful friends – there are no lengths to which rich parents will not go to help their children look “rounded” for their Ucas forms. Private schools and private tutors can of course improve exam performance, but the effect is smaller. It’s easier to stuff a child’s curriculum than help her excel in an exam for which she has no aptitude.
In fact, the exam hall and the marking room are those rare and sacred spaces into which even wealthy parents cannot intrude. Not that they haven’t tried. Toby Young, who achieved two Bs and a C at A-level, got into Oxford after his famous father made a call on his behalf. Hereditary peer Lord Bethel once tweeted this encouraging message to students: “I fluffed my A-levels. Taught me how to hustle. First to get a place in university. And haven’t stopped ever since.” Such hustling, these days, tends thankfully not to work. The pandemic, meanwhile, has taught us the problem with teacher assessment: fee-paying pupils are marked up. And the French and German systems may be more relaxed, but they do far less for the bright pupil from a poor background who wants to demonstrate his talent. Both France and Germany, by the way, lag far behind Britain and the US when it comes to social mobility.
It’s odd, then, that objections to rigorous, externally marked exams so often come from the left. It’s not just Hyman, now a key figure shaping education policy. When in 2018, France tightened university selection criteria, there were widespread protests, and leftwing candidates promised to drop the changes.
Leftwing arguments against exams strike me as similar in tone to those against meritocracy: it isn’t quite meritocratic enough, and endows its winners with the idea they deserve their good fortune. (Such an argument was once made by Young’s leftwing academic father, Michael Young, in The Rise of the Meritocracy.)
But this avoids a brutal fact. Get rid of one sort of hierarchy and another will take its place. And the second will generally involve money and class. Any sort of elite tends to be pretty ingenious at justifying the natural order – whether they deem it ordained by God, a law of the universe, or merely a result of their intellectual worth.
When Cyril Burt helped lay the foundations for the 11-plus in the first half of the last century, he was fighting against the idea that the class system reflected natural ability, and intelligence among the working class would occur so rarely as to constitute a statistical freak. Exam results proved otherwise.
This year, we hear universities will accept more students on the basis of their predicted grades – rather than their actual results – in the scramble to fill places amid a fall in international applicants. That’s bad news: predicted grades disadvantage state school pupils. A-levels matter. We should take care they continue to do so.
Martha Gill is an Observer columnist