Record GCSE grades will reignite debate

New fears over achievement in secondary schools are expected to be raised tomorrow with the publication of GCSE results.

The brightest youngsters are expected to do even better, with schools producing star pupils achieving strings of 10 and more top-grade passes.

However, ministers will be braced for a repeat of last year's drop in the overall pass rate, which revealed achievement at the bottom end of the ability scale actually fell.

Another increase in the pass rate at top grades is expected tomorrow, pushing the proportion of entries at A* and Agrades up towards 60 per cent.

But last year the proportion of entries achieving any kind of GCSE pass fell from 97.9 per cent to 97.6 per cent, the first drop for nearly a decade.

Experts said the drop indicated the Government's failure to raise standards across the whole ability range in secondary schools.

Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Educat ion and Employment Research at Buckingham University, said ministers had only themselves to blame because of their " not part icularly humane" insistence that all pupils should tackle the exams.

Some knew they were only capable of getting Es, Fs or Gs at best and would rather fail than get results generally dismissed as useless by employers-At the other end of the spectrum, more than nine in 10 of the exams taken at leading public schools such as Eton, St Paul's, St Paul's Girls', North London Collegiate, Wycombe Abbey and Westminster are now awarded grades A* or A.

Tomorrow's results will sharpen the debate over the blueprint drawn up by former chief schools inspector Mike Tomlinson, who has proposed a new four-level diploma to replace both GCSE and A-levels within a decade.

One of the key aims of the reform is to recognise talent across the academic range, giving equal weight to achievement in vocational subjects and persuading more pupils to stay on in school after 16.

Tomorrow's results are also expected to show another increase in the proportion of entries at the top four grades, A* to C.

But the increase is unlikely to be big enough to match the Treasury's target of a two percentage point increase each year in return for extra funding in schools.

Missing that target again will be embarrassing for ministers, coming only two days after primary school results which showed goals for improvement set to be achieved two years ago have still not been reached.

It will also lend further credence to complaints from employers that young people coming out of the state school system lack the basic skills necessary for the workplace.