End this watering down of exams, says top head

Clarissa Farr warned yesterday that exams were too often made easier in order to pander to a culture of low aspirations.

Her school, St Paul's Girls' in West London, has already scrapped maths GCSE in favour of a tougher exam modelled on the old O-level, which does not include coursework.

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It has also devised its own music and art courses because GCSEs offer "too little opportunity for personal intellectual exploration".

And while St Paul's is strongly supportive of GCSE science, it is concerned at recent moves by exam boards to increase the number of "lowdemand" questions.

Miss Farr said: "The response to falling numbers taking up a subject, or students appearing to find it difficult to get high grades, should not be "let's make the questions easier and easier and easier".

"It requires a fundamental look at how it is being taught. It is absolute short-termism to simply say we can solve things by making the tests easier.

"We need to move away from the presumption that because in some of these areas things are difficult, they should be optional."

She added: "I am very much against the watering down of GCSEs and I would say that if I were a comprehensive school head."

Miss Farr spoke out as the £13,623-a-year school broke GCSE records with the biggest haul of top grades ever earned.

Pupils passed 99 per cent of exams at grades A* and A, with 86 per cent at grade A*.

Miss Farr said the school had concentrated on boosting its A* haul this summer because top universities were increasingly using them to allocate places.

Her warning follows the revelation that exam boards are preparing to increase the proportion of questions requiring simpler or multiple choice answers on foundation GCSE science papers from 55 per cent to 70 per cent.

In higher papers, the proportion of easier "low-demand" questions will rise from 45 per cent to 50 per cent.

The aim is to help stop children being "turned off" by science.

Ministers also scrapped compulsory language lessons for 14-year-olds in 2004, leading to a dramatic fall-off in the numbers taking GCSEs in the subject.

But Miss Farr said that schools should not pander to the low aspirations of some parents.

"One problem is a lack of ambition in parents sometimes, a readiness to be easily satisfied," she said.

"It is not going to help by playing to this tendency ourselves."

Her warning came as figures from the Independent Schools Council showed that pupils in feepaying schools scored three times as many As and A* grades as the average for teenagers across the country.

Nearly six out of ten GSCE exams taken in private schools were awarded a grade A or A*.