Quis custodiet?
Tom Winnifrith The recent proposals by the Schools Council to abolish 0 Level and CSE in favour of one common examination will cause a lot of heartsearching in schools. They should also be worrying all of us in higher education. At first sight the defence of the 0 level seems an unlikely rallying point for the ivory towered academic. In our consistent way we tend to forget how many 0 levels we obtained, or boast proudly of having tailed History at 0 level although now teaching it at university, or complain bitterly that our less intelligent pupils expect us to guide them through Richard 11 as if they were reading it for 0 level. Selectors for university extrance pay some attention to 0 level results, but are all too well aware of the gap between a competent well-drilled candidate who scores high marks at the age of sixteen, and the intelligent well-motivated applicant whom we want at our universities two years later. We flatter ourselves that in our research we are exploring the frontiers of our subject, and we tend to despise an examination of the well trodden highways at the centre.
The intellectual gap between a doctoral dissertation and an 0 level answer means that those of us concerned with doctorates tend to approach humbler examinations on emotional rather than rational grounds. And here the odds are stacked against the conventional type of examination and in favour of the free-wheeling experimental assessment, largely controlled by the teachers, which the School Council seems to favour.
In universities where, with the help of external examinations, we largely control our own examinations, many of us have fought a successful battle against the tyranny of the conventional examination and we tend to feel that the 0 level is a similar tyrant. For obvious reasons, 0 level tends to be associated with the old fashioned grammar school, and it is not only for egalitarian or political motives that university teachers tend to shy away from this combination. Many of us who are university teachers feel that we might have ended up teaching in a grammar school, and most of us feel glad that we didn't. The regular hours, monotonous work and pressure from external sources on our teaching methods and curriculum seem alien to our way of life, superficially akin to the brave new world of experiment, internal assessment and provocative ideas, favoured by the Schools Council.
Yet universities have been extremely wary of the Schools Council's proposals. We are, of course, worried by their cost at a time when our own budgets are being ruthlessly slashed. The GSE examining boards, which control 0 and A level examinations, in spite of their diverse history and apparently haphazard creation, represents a long-standing and successful partnership between schools and universities. Their abolition will inevitably lead to a loss of control by universities over the curriculum in schools, and to a widening of the gap between schoolteachers and university lecturers. Those few of us who have served in both capacities must marvel at the adaptability of our pupils who can pass so easily from one institution to the other, but the GCE examining boards were one place where schools could learn from universities and vice versa, and perhaps they helped us to bridge the gap for our pupils.
More serious are our worries about the nature of the Schools Council's proposed examination. We fear that it will be impossible to sit papers for sixty per cent of the population without a decline in academic standards. Although a few progressive educational journalists may regard the defence of academic standards as risible, it is one of the few causes that most university lecturers would cheerfully die for, although we would probably die still arguing about the exact nature of our standards.
Some of us in Arts subjects have been uneasily aware of slipping standards in the past few years, and perhaps this makes us regard 0 level as a crumbling bastion from which we would like to retreat if we could find a possible alternative. The rumour about a decline in 0 level standards would seem to be confirmed by our pupils who come up to university with good 0 levels and A levels, but unable to spell, punctuate, read outside their subject, or relate their subject to the conduct of their life. I recently saw a set of examination scripts in which candidate after candidate confused the words 'depraved' and 'deprived'. The cultivation of sociological jargon at the expense of any knowledge of the English language means that in this Orwellian day and age (my least favourite cliché) we are all on the side of the underprivileged and depraved. English literature is a notoriously unreliable examination, and here the GCE boards could adopt a more flexible approach while insisting on basic levels of literacy.
Teachers of more objective subjects such as foreign languages still find 0 level and A level a good criterion of suitability for an academic course, and in foreign languages the problem is not so much one of falling standards as of falling numbers. 0 level English is a qualification much in demand by employers such as banks, and one wonders how they are going to manage if the Schools Council have their own way. Presumably they could set their own examinations, and the universities may well follow suit, thus reintroducing the old GCE boards in a different guise. Such a course of action might well be desirable, as it would perhaps stiffen standards.
It is possible, however, to see attempts being made to prevent universities setting any entrance requirements at all. A few months ago a private member's Bill to make universities comprehensive came perilously close to a second reading in the House of Commons. In the same way as university teachers make false analogies between their situation and that of schools, it would seem that members of parliament are all too ready to cast universities in the same role as the wicked grammar schools, exclusive, reactionary and narrowly academic. There would be no entry qualification for the comprehensive university, although the Schools Council examination, where there are no failures, only unclassified passes, would make an excellent non-qualification. The comprehensive university would cater for all levels of intellectual ability and presumably all subjects as well. The first in Greats would rub shoulders with the BA in hairdressing, there would be no feeling of inferiority or superiority, there would be no heartache at eighteen plus and none would be more equal than anyone else.
Were it not for the close vote and the Schools Council recommendation one would feel that the comprehensive university was a long way off. As it is, one has to argue against it seriously, and one cannot take a simple anti-comprehensive line. After all, students at the age of eighteen who wanted to go to university to read hairdressing would not create havoc among those who wanted to learn or teach Greek, and there could be no real case for saying that the groves of Academe would sprout into a blackboard jungle overnight. On the other hand those of us who live in the groves of Academe know that Greek is a harder subject than hairdressing, and for that reason has up to now received more acclaim as a subject of academic distinction.
The decline in the numbers of students offering Latin and Greek has been one of the most prominent features of examination statistics in the past few years, although perhaps through vis inertiae 0 level Latin is still a popular subject. The mind boggles at Schools Council Latin. No doubt it was wrong that students struggled not very successfully to obtain .0 level Latin because they thought such a qualification elevated them above the common herd, or trained their minds, or, as a former Headmaster of Eton once explained to me, taught them moral certainty because it enabled them to get things right. My experience of Etonian Latin compelled me to reply that he must be running a very immoral school, as the boys so often get things wrong. At the same time without 0 level Latin the study of the classics at our universities will wither away, and this seems a pity. Already the barbarians are at the gates; in spite of brave new words about exciting Classical studies replacing boring old gerund-grinding few students
doing a General Paper at A/0 level could recognise a Homeric reference to hollow Ships in an Auden poem and some students seemed totally ignorant about the Trojan war, knowledge of which has survived nearly three thousand years and two dark ages. Some Spectator readers may not recognise the Latin quotation at the head of this article, and few will remember the typically Obscene context in which Juvenal uses these Words. Let us hope that Mr Mulley who is the present guardian of our examinations is not rendered impotent by the pleas of the Schools Council.
Previous page
