They Have Their Entrances And Their Exits

Good for Imperial College, London, which is reintroducing an entrance exam. This is no way devalues A-levels, which were never supposed to be, and did not used to be, merely entrance exams for universities. Rather, it restores A-levels as qualifications in their own right.

After all, there is absolutely no relationship (and I really do mean absolutely none whatever) between A-level results and classes of degree. Universities have admitted on A-level grades only because they had given up setting their own entrance exams, to the detriment both of the A-level system and of universities.

Now we need to restore O-levels for the most academic pupils. And above all, we need to restore grammar schools, but on the German Gymnasium model, thereby avoiding the crudity of the 11-plus.

Alongside the grammar schools would be the technical schools, of which there were never anything like as many as there should have been; the special schools, horrendously Beechingised by that ridiculous Warnock woman; and the Secondary Modern schools, delivering exactly as much academic and technical education as most people really need and can take in, and vastly, vastly better than that which has so very often replaced them.