Level Best

Michael Gove should note that over half of people now reading for degrees do not have A-levels. And why not? A-levels were never supposed to be, and did not used to be, entrance exams for universities. A-levels were qualifications in their own right. So they should be again. Universities could set their own entrance exams, as they used to. Again, why not?

I thoroughly enjoyed my A-levels and, not "but", I did not read English, French or History at university. Knowing about the decline of the Liberal Party (as I recall, I was the only member of my A-level class not to do a personal study on either Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union) is its own reward, as is simply adoring The Winter's Tale, and as is being able to read, both Zola in the original, and the French papers when there is a Presidential Election coming up.

There is no relationship, and I really do mean absolutely none whatever, between A-level results and classes of degree. Why should there be? Universities have admitted on A-level grades only because they have given up setting their own entrance exams, to the detriment both of the A-level system and of the universities themselves.

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.