No need for an Advanced British Standard, education has been through enough upheaval - Yorkshire Post Letters

The report on page four of The Yorkshire Post, May 2, about the Advanced British Standard (proposed replacement for A levels and T levels) prompted me to write to my MP. This is another monstrously expensive white elephant under construction.

A summary of my comments to my MP follows, and I would love to see some deeper analysis in the TYP of who is backing this and what their hidden agendas are - very likely driven by large parts of the IT and educational publishing industries (including bits owned by the Prime Minister's wife's family).

These giant firms only prosper when there is upheaval - stability means no new software needed.

I do hope the Labour government will cancel this programme. It's time to stop the endless churn of policies and initiatives. Time to increase staffing ratios, to fix the fabric of the school estate, and to continue the recovery from Covid.

ABS seems to have been driven by the Prime Minister's facile notion that literacy and numeracy will be boosted by forcing students to study some form of maths and English until the age of 18.

We then hear the same old drivel about the need to achieve parity of esteem for academic and vocational qualifications - it would be easier to achieve parity of esteem between chalk and cheese.

I do hope Labour will have the sense to avoid further upheaval. Just tell the press to shut it when they start banging on about how we lag behind other countries on this, that or the other statistic, PISA tables etc - I doubt whether more than 1 per cent of the electorate even notices such topics.

A decade for reflection, steady-as-she-goes, feeding (later) into a proper review where the outcome has not been decided in advance, would be hugely beneficial.

Could The Yorkshire Post interview the relevant minister and ask why it is felt that the money to be spent on ABS would not be better spent on repairs and teacher retention?