Pre-U – the new A-level?

Top private schools are leading a push to bring in tougher new exams for youngsters, says Michael Howard

This weekend thousands of jittery youngsters nationwide will be nervously mugging up on reading lists in preparation for interviews at Oxford and Cambridge, which start early next month. All are top grade students, but they can no longer rely on their A-levels alone. Forty years ago fewer than 10% of A-level passes were A grades, last summer nearly a quarter were. This autumn Oxford expects to reject 9,000 students, most of them with three predicted As at A-level, Cambridge will turn away 10,000.

With so many gifted pupils being denied a place at an elite university, private schools, including Eton, Dulwich and Harrow, are now turning up the heat in the fight for tougher exams for 16 and 18-year-olds.

The threat is that some of our best schools will switch to alternatives to both GCSEs and A-levels, creating a two-tier exam system — for rich pupils in private schools and poorer ones in the state sector — unless ministers make existing tests harder. Chris Woodhead, the former chief inspector of schools, warns “we now have an exam system in meltdown”.

About 100 leading schools say that in 2008 they may dump A-levels for a new exam, the Pre-U, which is also being backed by several universities. For 16-year-olds, 200 private schools have already introduced the International GCSE (IGCSE), regarded as a stiffer exam than the GCSE. The latter is slated for including coursework, widely regarded as an incitement to cheat.

“I expect that more than 50 independent schools will offer the Pre-U, mostly instead of current A-levels,” says Graham Able, headmaster of Dulwich college. “I also expect that many state schools will wish to do so.”

“We want the best courses that challenge our students and, if that means doing the Pre-U instead of A-levels then we will do it,” confirms Tony Little, head master of Eton college. He says he has “real concerns about the future of A-levels”, particularly in the sciences, which he worries may be further dumbed down. “We want ministers to reform A-levels.”

Although Nigel Richardson, headmaster of the Perse school in Cambridge, has not yet decided whether his school will adopt the Pre-U, he too warns that most private school heads are sick of government inaction.

“We are looking for an exam that will make it easier for universities to discriminate . . . this could be a real alternative,” he says. “We cannot wait forever for changes to GCSEs and A-levels. No popular university can make fair decisions when 90% of sixthformers get A and B grades at A-level.”

But at the moment it looks as though education ministers are unlikely to give way. Last week a report from the government’s exams regulator put a dampener on hopes that the IGCSE could be adopted by state schools too. The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority said that the exams were incompatible with the national curriculum. Although ministers are taking further soundings, a spokesman for the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) says, “Our commitment to GCSEs remains as firm as ever. There are no plans to drop these qualifications.”

So far ministers have also not acted on advice from the exams regulator backing a new tougher A* grade at A-level, involving compulsory questions built into the existing exam. The only changes in the pipeline are voluntary extra questions which bright children could choose to tackle and an essay project, also optional. One critic described these changes as “tweaking and fiddling”.

Quizzed on the risk that private schools will really adopt the Pre-U and ditch A-levels one education source was sceptical. “Well, will they?” he asked. “I think these schools have seized on this as a way to make the government bring in an A* A-level. But the truth is they will fall back to what they know and sort of love, which is the A-level. The reason A-levels have survived so many years is because people like them.”

The Pre-U will be piloted next September in schools that might include Harrow and Eton, according to a spokeswoman for University of Cambridge International Examinations, the exam board which is developing the new qualification. The same exam board also offers the IGCSE.

Meanwhile the DfES is backing a £1.6m study of the American Scholastic Aptitude Test. Last summer 10,000 sixthformers nationwide sat the Sat and the results, comparing their performance with their A-level results, will be released soon. But with the study due to run until 2010, when the students will have completed their degrees, the Sat does not look like a timely solution to the selection dilemmas universities have right now.

With the national exam system under attack, over in Oxford Emma Smith, tutor for English at Hertford College, is preparing for weeks of interviewing, trying to choose from hundreds of students who, on paper at least, look very similar. For every one she can offer a place to, the college will turn away three.

“We need a test that measures intelligence and aptitude,” she says wearily. “I think it’s the holy grail of admissions. At the moment it just doesn’t exist.”