The lessons A-levels don't teach

The hot, sticky atmosphere combined with a persistent alarm in a nearby flat to ensure that I spent most of Tuesday night lying in bed wide awake. The same thing always happens when I can't sleep. My brain goes off in all sorts of directions and then hones in on a moment of sheer, unblinking terror: the start of my A-levels.

I can never understand adult friends who announce that they have started a course and are about to submit themselves, voluntarily, to more exams. The idea of putting myself through that again is beyond me. Never, ever again, thank you very much.

But maybe I'd have a different attitude if I'd been taking my A-levels this year, instead of in 1983. With a pass rate of 94.3 per cent, after all, the ultimate terror of yesteryear - failure - is almost impossible.

Children today spend their entire lives studying for, and then taking, exams. Parents describe the wearying trudge, especially in the sixth form with the addition of AS levels, the sense of restless preparation and the queasy climax of results day.

But to what end? An exam which - as this year - is failed by just 5.7 per cent of its candidates is flawed for two critical reasons. First, and most obviously, because it fails in its very purpose: separating children out.

The reason why A-levels are taken, after all, is to provide an objective measure of children's ability. Armed with that judgment, prospective employers and universities can then, in theory, make a decision about an applicant's suitability for a particular job or course.

That is now a fiction. Bristol University had 1,800 applicants this year for 65 places in English. Nine hundred were predicted to get three As at A-level.

What use is an exam which produces that result? The 900 clearly do not all have the same abilities, and the university needs to know who is best equipped to meet its standards.

But such a result, and the exam which produces it, makes it impossible to differentiate between candidates on A-levels - the only objective criterion - alone. As one of the university's admissions tutors put it: "It means we rely increasingly on the candidate's personal statement as a way of finding out more about them." Other universities use interviews for the same reason.

Wait a minute, though: the reason why A-levels, and other public exams, were invented was precisely to limit the extent to which personal statements and interviews mattered. And that was, not least, because of the class bias of so many universities, where tutors tended to prefer, as the writer Edward Shils put it in the 1950s, "the amiable, well-connected public school dunce, keen on rugger and beagling but usually too drunk for either, likely to pass without effort (or qualifications) into the upper-middle ranks of government or business". Exams were supposed to put an end to that, and give children who dropped their aitches as good an opportunity in life as those who went orf to the country at the weekend.

So the result of the drive to make A-levels more accessible is to end up back where we started - lacking useful objective tools for differentiating between candidates and having to rely on personal impression.

But there's another failing, which goes beyond the mechanics of the exam and reflects instead the way we treat children today. We cannot all be winners. No matter how blessed our lives may be, we all have disappointments, and we all have to deal with failure at some point. But the message given out by A-levels is precisely the opposite: that, as the Dodo put it in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, "all shall have prizes".

One of the main factors behind the 94.3 per cent pass rate, after all, is the introduction of the AS-level, devised so that all could indeed have prizes.

This year there were 50,000 fewer A-level entries than last, because thousands of pupils took AS-levels instead - exams which are consciously intended to be of a lower standard (to "filter out", as the officials put it, candidates for whom A-levels are too difficult). But because universities treat AS-levels as being worth half a full A-level in their point-scoring process, it is, perversely, now much easier for candidates not up to A-level standard to gain the required number of points for university entry, by dint of taking a lower standard exam and doing well.

So we end up cheating our children with a double whammy. We redesign the sixth-form syllabus so that more pupils can get the best A-level grades, which gives a false sense of equal ability; then we allow those who can't manage A-levels an easier route to success. Children - and their teachers - aren't stupid. When they see, as they did last year, that even with the reduced demands of an AS-level 30 per cent of entrants none the less failed maths, they drop it. Thus there were also 12,000 fewer A-level maths candidates this year than last.

In so many areas of their lives we treat children as adults, but educationally we deceive them. A recent survey by ICM, for instance, showed that in this most fundamental of entr?es to adulthood, we infantilise our children: more than half of parents offer rewards such as clothes, CDs and cash for A-level success. A third offer at least £50, and a fifth more than £100. They are treating A-levels as the equivalent of the tooth fairy.

Life does not separate out so readily into back routes made available for those who can't make it via the front door. It's not even as if such methods work, in the end, for the children themselves. By opening the university door to almost anyone who wants to come on in, we deceive them.

For many, university is simply the wrong choice. Sixteen per cent of first-year undergraduates drop out (in many institutions the figure is around 30 per cent), realising far too late that everything they have been told to work for is wrong for them. The argument about higher or lower standards thus misses the real point.

But there is a more fundamental issue about the way we treat our young adults, and the basic failure of the system to allow them to learn the most adult lesson of all: all cannot have prizes. If they do, those prizes become worthless. That is the cruellest deception of all.

Stephen Pollard is a senior fellow at the Centre for the New Europe, a Brussels-based think-tank