A-levels ARE getting easier admits Brown's new maths adviser

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Maths are getting easier

The respected academic appointed to overhaul maths teaching in schools has admitted A-levels are getting easier.

Sir Peter Williams, chosen by Gordon Brown last week to advise on reforming lessons, acknowledged standards had been slipping for many years.

His remarks are an embarrassment to education ministers who have derided what they called the 'standards are falling lobby' as driven by 'emotion and prejudice'.

Sir Peter said: 'Over 20 or 30 years, I don't think there is any doubt whatsoever that absolute A-level standards have fallen.

'They have edged south, continuously over a long period of time. I think all university academics and a good proportion of sixth-form teachers would agree with my assertion.'

He said there was a widely held perception that A-levels in general were getting easier but in his specialism of maths and physics this was a 'testable fact'. Sir Peter, who chairs the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education, said comparisons of past A-levels with current papers showed that students today face equations requiring less knowledge and understanding.

This had forced universities to adapt their degree courses, he told a Sunday newspaper.

Some were now stretched over four years instead of three because students needed more time to follow simpler studies.

In some physics courses, thermodynamics was being taught in the second year rather than the first because freshers could no longer master it.

His verdict is reinforced by studies from Durham University which compared A-level results with performance in independent reasoning tests over 20 years.

Dr Robert Coe found that pupils of the same ability achieved two grades higher in most subjects in 2006 than in 1988, rising to three grades in maths.

However school ministers have always insisted rising standards are down to better teaching and harder work by students.

One, Jim Knight, has attacked a 'general misconception that the A-level has become impossible to fail and that A grades are handed out like sweets'.

'This, like many myths surrounding the exams, is nonsense,' he said last year. In 2005, when pre-empting rising A-level results, Lord Adonis said: 'Continued progress in exam performance is real - it is not the result of dumbing down of standards - and the roots of this success lie in a fundamental shift in the quality of teaching in our schools.'

Meanwhile a predecessor in the role, David Miliband, who is now Foreign Secretary, insisted in 2003: 'There is no evidence that exam standards have been lowered.'

He went on: 'Results are getting better because teaching and learning are getting better too.

'It's too easy for those who have done well out of the old system to knock the progress of successor generations. It is the British disease.'

However, acknowledging doubts over the credibility of A-levels last year, ministers announced a new A-star grade to challenge the brightest pupils as well as a return to more traditional Oxbridge-style questions.

Students achieving more than 90 per cent in their exams by showing the greatest insight in open-ended questions will be awarded the new supergrade.

Sir Peter, who is chancellor of Leicester University, said: 'I believe that, with some more stretch and challenge inserted into it, the A-level is still the right vehicle.

'We should not decry the fact that increasingly large cohorts of young 18- year- old men and women attain higher levels in their graduation qualification coming out of secondary education.

'That is something we should applaud.

'It is the universities' job, then, to somehow select the most appropriate pupils.'

He said he did not think the decline in A-level standards was 'disastrous'.

Sir Peter was recruited last week to lead an inquiry into maths teaching at primary level in a bid to promote 'deeper understanding' of the subject.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: 'Sir Peter Williams is an expert in his field and he will do an excellent job in his review of primary level maths.

'As for A-levels, the Qualifications Curriculum Authority, the Government's independent advisers on the maintenance of the exam system, has a regular programme of monitoring and quality assurance and these most recent studies show that the exam standards have been maintained over time.'

 

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