National exams call for pupils aged 14

It calls for pupils to take exams two years earlier to give them an idea of their capabilities before they choose qualifications for the future.

The study, commissioned by the Sutton Trust, says England's current system forces young people to make life-changing decisions too early.

The report, by Prof Alan Smithers and Dr Pamela Robinson of Buckingham University, compared secondary schooling in England with that in other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.

It concludes that 26 of the 30 countries studied have clear academic, technical and vocational paths for pupils in the final years of their education. Many separate secondary schools into "lower" and "upper" schools.

But in England this is not the case.

It calls for a revamp of the schools system to create "14-18 education" which allows pupils to focus on the qualifications that are right for them.

The report says: "If the Government wished, it could make education 14-18 a reality by moving and adapting GCSE to become the national examination for 14-year-olds.

"This would then become the natural starting point for an array of awards taking young people in different directions.

"If these were sufficiently attractive, young people would want to stay on for as long as it took to gain a qualification and there would be no need for the sticks necessary to impose compulsory staying-on."

Prof Smithers said: "Education would be compulsory up to the age of 14, with a national curriculum. What you would need is an external qualification, which could be adapted from GCSEs, at the age of 14, to assess pupils' capabilities.

"After that you would have a range of options, of differing length, that pupils could choose to take. They would lead to good qualifications that meant something and led somewhere.

"They would choose on the basis of the objective information they would get from an externally-set national examination."

He added: "At the moment, young people are making life-changing decisions often without any clear idea of their capabilities and taking those decisions by default, based on what their particular school offers."

The report says that such a move could also allow specialist schools to become "genuinely specialist" by selecting pupils based on their talent for a subject. This currently happens in the United States, Korea, Japan and Turkey, it says.

The study also calls for the Government to be decisive about school admissions - for example, if it is based on proximity to school, ballots, or selecting on merit.

The Government would not have to determine entry criteria if it simply let schools set their own policies - this would hand more autonomy to schools.

Sutton Trust chairman Sir Peter Lampl said: "England remains an outlier on the international stage in terms of the different educational pathways offered to children during their formative years – and effectively we have differentiation by default: all too often children's choices are dictated by the school they happen to be in, not their own talents and interests."