Elite universities will struggle to find brightest

The gender gap widened at the top, with 25.3 per cent of girls’ exams awarded A grades compared with 22.7 per cent for boys. Boys dominated the tiny minority of A-level failures, with 4.2 per cent of their papers ungraded against 2.8 per cent for girls.

Ellie Johnson Searle, director of the JCQ, said that rising pass rates at A level reflected a change of culture. The Curriculum 2000 reforms, which introduced AS levels at 17, enabled students to complete subjects for A level that they already knew they were good at.

“This is not the 1960s any more — we talk about inclusion, we don’t talk about exclusivity,” she said; but Dr Searle acknowledged the difficulty facing elite universities of distinguishing between students with clutches of A grades.

“This year, 9.5 per cent of them achieved three As at A level, and what are we going to do about that?” she said.

Reforms to provide universities with the grades achieved by students in individual units of their exams would help next year, she said. In the meantime, Dr Searle suggested that universities could ask students for this information.

The Government plans to add tougher questions to exam papers to challenge the best students. Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary, has indicated that he favours a new A* grade to reward students who do well on these questions, but John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said: “This will devalue grades A and B, and increase stress and anorexia among bright 17 and 18 year-olds, as happened when GCSE A* grades were introduced.”

Steve Sinnott, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said that increasing numbers of schools were switching to the International Baccalaureate diploma instead of A levels because it was seen as a more demanding qualification.

“We could in the long term see Baccalaureate for the elite universities and then the specialist diploma [for the rest],” he said.

“The comprehensive approach that A levels currently represent could be seriously undermined. We could have two routes going in different directions — specialist diplomas in one direction, baccalaureates in the other.”

A 9.6 per cent increase in entries for media studies propelled it into the top ten most popular subjects at A level for the first time, with almost 31,000 entries. PE studies and religious studies were among the five fastest-growing subjects.

Changes to the maths curriculum following a slump in entries were credited with a 5.8 per cent rise this year, making it the third most popular A level with nearly 56,000 candidates.

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The JCQ said that there had been a significant increase in entries for chemistry, up 3.1 per cent, and biology, which rose by 1.7 per cent. Interest in languages was stable, with entries up by 5.1 per cent for German, by 1.1 per cent for French, and by 2.7 per cent for Spanish.

However, an analysis of entries over the past decade by Professor Alan Smithers, at the University of Buckingham, showed a drift away from traditional academic subjects towards those perceived as easier.

He said that A level entries had risen by 9 per cent overall between 1996 and 2006, but entries for media studies had more than tripled over the same period, while those for PE studies and psychology had more than doubled.

In contrast, demand for French had almost halved from 27,490 in 1996 to 14,650 now, German was down by 40 per cent, geography by 24 per cent and maths by 17 per cent.

Professor Smithers said that media studies was popular because it offered a good route to an A level for teenagers with “ordinary” ability. “It is appealing, it is a sexy subject and it actually provides something that the ordinarily able can cope with and get an A level qualification,” he said.

In Wales students passed 96.9 per cent of their exams, a rise of 0.1 percentage point, with 23.9 per cent awarded A grades. Students in Northern Ireland again performed best, with the overall pass rate up 0.2 to 97.7 per cent, and A grades awarded to 32.4 per cent of entries.

TWO THIRDS OF PLACES ALREADY TAKEN

Almost 60 per cent of university applicants had their places confirmed yesterday after publication of this year’s record A level results (Tony Halpin writes).

The Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) said that 286,260 students had confirmed places, including 2,297 accepted through the clearing process. This was 9,000 fewer than in 2005, when total applications were up by more than 8 per cent as students scrambled to avoid the increase in annual tuition fees this year to £3,000.

The number of students seeking vacant places through clearing this year is down by 3,000, to just over 96,000, underlining the pressure faced by some universities to offer fee discounts to meet their recruitment targets. A rise in the number of candidates withdrawing applications in clearing prompted fears that some students were deterred by the fee increase from seeking vacancies.

The total, in comparison with the first day of clearing last year, was up by nearly 2,700 to 5,923. Ucas said that the figure included students who had withdrawn after accepting offers of places at university.

Students are eligible to enter clearing if they fail to gain the A level grades required by one of their two preferred universities.