WHAT did we learn from the painstaking analysis of the 2024 A-level results? The north-south divide has widened, with a vast gulf in performance between the south-east and the east midlands. Independent schools outperformed state schools. OK, so what’s new?
Two striking features emerged, although the signs have been there for some time. In the first instance, analysts expect the 2024 data to show that students used the post-A-level UCAS clearing system more than ever before. The view that clearing is used mainly by students whose grades fell below expectations is no longer accurate. Increasingly, students are also using clearing to trade in an already accepted first-choice offer for a better deal.
The evidence is mounting, therefore, that the infamous predicted-grades pantomime could well be on the way out. Teachers hate it, and parents invariably try to persuade subject-teachers to view an offspring’s prospects with rose-tinted spectacles. Are we finally moving to a university application system based on actual results? Watch this space.
The other observation is that the once-admired Blairite goal of a 50 per cent of 18-year-olds enrolling on a university course has now definitively withered on the vine. It fell back to 35.8 per cent in 2023, and will be watched with interest this year when the proportion is confirmed.
Value for money has risen sharply as one of the determining factors in the minds of school-leavers. Associated with this is what has been described as the “relentless rise of the commuter student” by Blackbullion, a financial-education website for university-goers. A survey of 1200 students found that no fewer than 46 per cent are commuting to university from home. It is sure to be more this year.
Rishi Sunak could well be looking on with a mixture of detached amusement and satisfaction. His assault on “rip-off “degrees seems to have had a marked effect.
But, perhaps, he will derive even more satisfaction from the data on A-level examination entries. Maths entries topped the poll for the eighth year running, and it became the first subject ever to attract more than 100,000 entries. Sure, there has been a corresponding collapse in the entries for other subjects, but it is now hard to envisage that the popularity of maths will be reversed in the short to medium term.
Other curriculum debates will no doubt come to the fore. For the moment, Mr Sunak’s British Baccalaureate proposal looks moribund. The issue at the heart of the proposed reform, the narrowness of the current A-level system, has not gone away, but, for the time being, the cost-of-learning crisis has to be at the forefront of our thinking.
IN COMMON with many former head teachers,I find it not unusual to come across former students. After the usual pleasantries (assuming that they were not expelled, or regular visitors to the school’s “naughty step”), the conversation invariably moves in the direction of “What are you up to now?”
Pippa Linden Howes is about to return to Merton College, Oxford, after her year abroad, to complete her French and Spanish degree. She ticks all the right boxes: northern comprehensive, single parent, blended family, no obvious longstanding family university tradition.
Her reply to my mild enquiry was forthright: “Why did we not receive any useful financial advice at school?” Mortgages, pensions, ISAs, hedge funds, shares, derivatives, and the rest. Or, keeping it simple, how best to budget? The only answer that I could give confirmed merely to what extent times have changed.
It would once have been easy for me to say: “You will discover about all those parts of life when you have to” — much as we did with the ill-fated discussions about parenting skills.
Changing a nappy may well not be appeal to 15-year-olds today, in much the same way as it didn’t to their parents at the same age. Investing for financial security, for profit, or merely budgeting to survive in today’s harsh financial climate, is a wholly different matter.
There is no need to add yet another subject to an already overloaded curriculum. Make “finance” a core component of the maths curriculum, and put the finance guru Martin Lewis in charge.
Dennis Richards is a former head of St Aidan’s C of E High School, Harrogate, North Yorkshire.