Professor Becky Francis has some huge decisions to make as she prepares to submit her final recommendations to the education secretary, Bridget Phillipson.
Francis follows a long line of ‘independent education experts’ tasked by ministers to examine the efficacy of the national curriculum, including post-16 skills.
More recent holders of the title include Sir Mike Tomlinson, known as the “safest pair of hands in education”. He advised New Labour in 2004. Meanwhile, Baroness Alison Wolf conducted her review during the Tory-led coalition government (2010-15).
Both these curriculum reviews turned out to be poison chalices.
Tomlinson couldn’t get traditionalists in Downing Street to abolish A levels, so the then education secretary, Ed Balls, pressed ahead with implementing 14-19 diplomas that failed to gain traction.
The Wolf Review took a ‘flamethrower’ to so-called ‘non-value’ qualifications, only for the cohort of secondary pupils that came after to be worse off in attainment terms, according to the only academic study of the period.
Researchers found the reforms led to a fall in the percentage of pupils achieving Level 2 of the national qualifications framework (5 or more A*-C grades at GCSE or equivalent), from 72 per cent in both 2012 and 2013 to 61 per cent in 2014.
In other words, these reforms achieved the opposite of what they were supposed to.
That’s why this latest curriculum review must make the case based on first principles. Not political gerrymandering or some wishful thinking about ‘parity of esteem’.
T level policy is a case in point. Since Lord Sainsbury completed his review in 2016, this political chameleon and multi-party donor has been on manoeuvres to secure his backward vision of upper-secondary education.
Sainsbury makes no secret of his agenda in his book, Windows of Opportunity. He dislikes awarding bodies’ independence, competition between providers, and student qualification choices; hence, the Department for Education owns T levels.
The segregated upper secondary curriculum whereby students are forced to make a binary choice between A levels and T levels was all his idea. As the Protect Student Choice campaign demonstrated in opposition to the abolition of BTECs, it’s the old class politics of the 1944 Education Act all over again. Instead of pupils divided at 11 between academic and technical ability, this new form of education apartheid is enforced at age 16.
Today’s youth cohort is made to choose between A levels and T levels – they can’t combine both.
Fundamentally, this is why T levels are doomed to fail. Young people and their working-class parents are not stupid. They can see when a liberal elite is trying to pigeonhole their offspring into two different brain types: the grammar track for the academically minded and the occupational track for those more ‘practical’ in their dispositions.
As a professor of education, Becky Francis will know that this was the same position taken by the Norwood Committee in 1943. After the war, it led to the discredited 11-plus examinations and segregated secondary education.
The Labour titan of 1960s education, Anthony Crosland, famously got rid of this socially divisive system by issuing his 10/65 Circular, introducing comprehensive schools.
That’s why T levels are so stuck in the past. They are premised on perpetuating class divisions instead of the powerful and progressive idea that all our young people, regardless of background, should benefit from a good comprehensive education until the compulsory leaving age.
Eighteen is effectively the school-leaving age in England. The government should set a high bar for all learners until this age, not divide them like sheep and goats.
Denying teenagers the choice of combining A levels with vocational options is nothing more than class prejudice masquerading as progress.
If Bridget Phillipson wants to go down in history as a transformative secretary of state, she must ensure her curriculum review ends the hard-wired unfairness of T levels, embracing diversity and choice for young people instead.
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