O-level’s return threatens major rift in coalition

PLANS to scrap GCSEs and replace them with more rigorous O-levels and easier CSEs threaten to cause a major rift in the coalition with Liberal Democrats vowing to block plans to create a “two-tier” education system.

As concerns deepened in education circles that the move risks branding teenagers as failures, Downing Street pointedly declined to say last night whether Prime Minister David Cameron approved of the proposals.

Education Secretary Michael Gove defended the leaked plans yesterday after being summoned to face urgent questions in the House of Commons.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

He claimed action was needed to ensure the nation’s schools kept pace with high performing countries and restored employers’ confidence in school qualifications.

Liberal Democrats reacted with fury, however, with sources saying they had been “kept in the dark” about the plans.

The most radical shake-up of the exams system for 30 years emerged yesterday with plans to replace GCSEs with O-levels in traditional academic subjects such as English, maths, the humanities and science.

The changes would also see less- able pupils taking simpler qualifications, similar to old-style CSEs, and the national curriculum for secondary schools abolished.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Labour warned the proposals risk dividing young people into winners and losers and also claimed the move could add to the North/South divide with more people likely to take CSEs in the north of England.

A Lib Dem source said: “Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems do not want to return to the divisions we saw in the 1950s. We are very, very hostile to something that looks like it is going to return to the two-tier system of the past.”

The party’s president, Tim Farron, said it would be madness to bring back a “divisive system” which Margaret Thatcher had scrapped in the 1980s.

Under the proposals, contained in leaked documents, most pupils would study “explicitly harder” exams in traditional academic subjects from 2014, with exams taken for the first time in 2016. Papers would be set by a single exam board in order to provide a “gold standard” test across England.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

It would mean that school- children currently in Year 8, aged 12 and 13, would be the last to take GCSEs. Less-able pupils will sit simpler examinations similar to the old CSEs – including tests in English and maths in order to provide them with “worthwhile” qualifications.

Speaking in the Commons, Shipley’s Tory MP Philip Davies said that 30 years ago having five O-levels would mean something to an employer whereas now having 10 GCSEs was “increasingly meaningless”. But other Yorkshire MPs and teaching unions have voiced concerns about the ideas.

Lib Dem Bradford East MP David Ward said: “The Education Secretary is dangerously fixated on a fantasy.

“He wants to return Britain to a ‘golden age’ of education that never really existed.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“Following his previous announcements on rote learning, I wouldn’t be surprised if chalk boards and compulsory fountain pens are next in the pipeline.

“He needs to realise that the world has moved on.”

Beverley and Holderness Conservative MP Graham Stuart, the chairman of the Education Select Committee, said: “The Government says it has two main educational goals, to raise standards for all and to close the gap between rich and poor. How exactly will a move back to traditional O-levels and some as yet unspecified other form of examination for lower performing pupils help close the gap between rich and poor?”

Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders said O-levels had existed when “vast numbers of young people left school either with no qualifications or ones that employers regarded as inferior”.