Imperial to set own entrance exam

The rector of Imperial College London said the A-level exam is no longer useful for discriminating between candidates.

Sir Richard Sykes also attacked the state education system, warning that slipping standards and poor teaching have failed the country's most gifted children.

He said it was "frightening" that 40 per cent of his students came from private schools where just seven per cent of pupils in Britain are taught.

Sir Richard called for radical action to "save" bright children by taking them out of state schools and using government cash to pay for them to go private. Speaking at the Independent Schools Council's annual conference in London yesterday, Sir Richard said:"Top institutions have great difficulty separating out the best students. Even if you interview all the students you still have a problem."

The university is trialling a new entrance exam for all students taking subjects other than medicine, where a separate test exists.

"We are doing this not because we don't believe in A-level but we cannot use A-levels any more as a discriminatory factor. They have all got four or five A-levels," Sir Richard added.

The new exam will assess candidates' general intelligence and creativity and could be brought in from 2010, with other top universities said to be keen to follow Imperial's lead."That hopefully would become a national system if that was seen to be successful for selecting students," he said.

Teenagers will still be expected to master their subjects by studying Alevels or other courses such as the International Baccalaureate.

But Sir Richard warned that the brightest children stood a far better chance of getting into leading universities if they were educated privately.

"We have got to do something radical if we are going to save children in 93 per cent of our schools that somehow are just not getting the education they deserve," he said.

"We have in this country some of the best secondary education in the world but only a few percentage of people benefiting from it.

"Why don't we make it available to those kids who are really going to benefit.If the Government have got some sense they would allow that to happen.

"Just as we used to run scholarship schemes in the past, why don't we do that today for those bright kids?"

Imperial has 12,000 full-time students studying engineering, medicine, and natural sciences courses and was ranked the world's fifth-best university in a recent global league table.

Schools minister Lord Adonis insisted that educational standards "are being maintained".

"The rise in numbers achieving higher grades is due to the increasing success of schools and should be celebrated," he said.

"To further underpin the quality of the qualifications system we have established the new independent regulator, Ofqual."