96% A-level pass rate

The rise in A-level pass rates is to continue tomorrow with at least 96 per cent expected to make the grade.

The Evening Standard can reveal that results are set to show the overall pass rate increasing from last year's 95.4.

At the same time, it is understood there has been another increase in the proportion of passes at A grade, possibly to 22.5 per cent.

The latest statistics will re-ignite the debate over whether the exams are getting too easy, although the Government insists that the results are due to hard work by schools.

But if the trend continues, the "no fail A-level" could be four years away.

That will make it even harder for universities, already faced with thousands of candidates with straight A grades, to pick the brightest students for their courses.

Already, top universities like Oxford and Cambridge are setting their own tests to select students for the most popular courses such as medicine and law. The exam boards insist that A-levels still represent an international "gold standard".

However, David Thomas, chief executive of the Careers Research Advisory Centre, called for tougher marking. He described the relentless rise in top grades as "alarming".

Since the early Eighties, the overall A-level pass rate has risen from about 70 per cent and the proportion achieving the top grade from around nine per cent. Up to that date, exam boards awarded roughly the same proportion of passes at each grade every year, regardless of how well candidates did overall.

Since then, they have maintained a fixed standard of difficulty for each exam, year on year, and awarded the appropriate grades to all candidates who reach it. Critics say the rise in the pass rate shows how this theoretical standard has been allowed to slip.

Education minister David Miliband insists that this standard is being maintained and hit out at "elitists" who peddle the "myth that more means worse".

Improving results, he said, were due to the hard work of teachers and the efforts of parents who wanted their children to have more education opportunities than they had.

Mr Miliband acknowledged that universities and employers needed a means of selecting the highest achievers. But he insisted that could be done without downgrading the successful efforts of an increasing number of candidates. "The answer to rising numbers of A grades is not to shift the goalposts so more people are downgraded, but instead to create new opportunities for the most able young people to distinguish themselves," he said.

Former chief schools inspector Mike Tomlinson is reviewing the structure of secondary school exams. He wants to create more opportunities to "stretch" the brightest candidates, possibly by bringing back more difficult essay-style questions.