Warwick Mansell's Blog

It was one of the most dispiriting examples of how the political process can get in the way of carefully-considered decisions on education policy that I have witnessed.

In early 2005, with an election looming, Tony Blair decided to overrule the advice of the Tomlinson committee, which had investigated qualifications reform, by deciding that GCSEs and A-levels would be staying more or less as they were, without becoming part of a larger, overarching qualification called the diploma.

Fair enough, some might say. Except that Mr Blair’s government had given Sir Mike Tomlinson, the former chief schools inspector, two years to come up with a blueprint for reform which, while far from perfect and potentially very complicated, had managed to win support from most within education. Why, if the intention had always been to keep the system they had, had the inquiry ever started?

These thoughts came flooding back this morning as I read that David Miliband, the former foreign secretary and now Labour leadership front-runner, had called for another rethink of the entire 14-19 qualifications system. Pupils, he said, were spending too much of their latter years of secondary school locked in to an “obstacle course” of exams.

“Success is often being achieved despite the testing system and not because of it,” he told the Guardian newspaper. Education, he added, still had to be Labour’s top priority.

David Miliband is no newcomer to qualifications reform. Way back in 1990, as a young research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), he was one of six authors of an IPPR pamphlet called “A British ‘Baccalaureate’”, which put forward the idea – which was never taken up but appears to have retained some attraction among more radically-inclined thinkers on qualifications reform - of replacing A-levels with a continental-style qualification offering a broader framework for study than the traditional three-subject A-level experience.

Then as schools minister from 2002, he joined his boss, the education secretary Charles Clarke, in seemingly supporting the Tomlinson vision in behind-the-scenes negotiations with Downing Street. However, with the Government about to respond to Tomlinson, both ministers were moved away from education by Mr Blair, with Ruth Kelly becoming secretary of state.

Miliband now says: “I had been working for two years on this historic English problem of the 14-19 curriculum. I think it was a historic error really that we did not follow through on the vision of a unified world class academic and vocational framework for curriculum and testing.”

Like all four former Labour ministers who are now contesting the party’s leadership, Mr Miliband will have to face the question as to why he did not speak out on this when in office.

But the more important point, for schools, is the substance of what he is saying.

He is right, of course, to criticise the “obstacle course” of exams. It is extraordinary that, towards the end of secondary school, teenagers can now find themselves faced with four years, from year 10 onwards, dominated by preparation for public exams. You would struggle to find any other country where this happens.

Perhaps more pertinently, is this what anyone connected with education would have come up with, if they were designing a system from scratch? I find that hard to believe. It has come about because individual reforms such as the Curriculum 2000 changes, which split the A-level into two, and the move towards modular GCSEs, have happened without anyone taking an overarching look at what this would mean, in educational terms, from a student’s viewpoint.

Tomlinson was an attempt at just such an approach. The only debate is the extent to which his reforms are more or less completely buried now, with the more vocationally-orientated diploma which eventually emerged under Labour gradually being marginalised by the Tories. A fresh look at this problem, which should also not ignore the central issue of how exam results are used to hold schools to account, is urgently needed.