When will we get the A-levels we deserve?

Politicians who gripe that commentators are cynical or cruel to point out galloping grade inflation while pupils are celebrating their results miss the point. People are not daft enough to believe that they are now living in a nation of geniuses and that the quality of teaching has been miraculously transformed.

Neither can they afford the kind of complacency that says British pupils are doing better and better when the competition their children will face is from the new democracies of Eastern Europe, India and China, where a hungry young population is learning faster and better than we are.

I do not mean that A-levels in rigorous subjects are not testing — or that teenagers do not work hard. But it's obvious to anyone who is not the Education Secretary or in charge of the qualifications quango, that this picture of ever-rising progress cannot be taken at face value.

Add the dispiriting fact that subjects like German, Russian, maths and physics thrive in the independent sector but fare less well in state schools and the overall achievement looks far less shiny. There, the solid knowledge-based subjects are declining — Alan Bennett's study of teenage ambition would have to be renamed The Media Studies Boys these days.

So good on Alan Ryan, the head of New College, Oxford, for telling it like it is. In the Times Higher Education Supplement, he observes that the "game is up" for A-levels in their present form. The result, he caustically observes, is universities providing remedial education in the hope of bringing their ill-prepared undergraduates up to scratch. Ryan is a liberal philosopher, not some rarefied duffer complaining for the sake of it.

His view is shared by many friends from my own generation of stateschool Oxford graduates. They became academics in part because they wanted to widen opportunities for the following generations — and feel frustrated that the exam system no longer equips pupils adequately to begin their degree courses.

Politicians cannot simultaneously claim that the A-level is still the gold standard of achievement and then say it needs an overhaul to stretch the best pupils. The Government has just about conceded as much — having denied grade inflation for years — by announcing a new A* from next year to challenge the brightest.

That's a token gesture towards excellence: not a reliable way of securing more of it. A-levels badly need overhauling — and all the parties are cowardly about it for fear of finding themselves on the wrong side of the parental charm offensive.

How did we get here? By a confluence of bad decisions and vested interests. The exam boards are commercial institutions in a fake market, all seeking to outdo each other in providing a "positive" service — and unwilling to fail their clients.

Schools, politicians and qualifications quangos naturally want to boast of ever-rising standards, so they are unwilling to be honest about the flaws or robust about what is needed.

The institutions which really know — the universities — have barely any say in the process of setting the standards or content of the tests..

Ed Balls, the new senior bottom in the Cabinet's Education seat, says he wants a "no excuses" culture in state schools. Well, good for him. But he will have to shake things up by more than an extra A* to get it.

The Conservatives have a real chance here to show that they are serious about education and not just pining for grammars. They should take apart the exam system relentlessly and explore how to make it work for a country that wants its graduates to lead the world. Now there's a task to occupy their new boy, Michael Gove — if he has the stomach for a fight that really matters..