The Baccalaureate

A Model for Curriculum Reform

Graham Phillips, Tim Pound

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135725143
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Every year the UK A-Level results bring with them the inevitable tide of questions about the quality and standard of the exams: Are they getting easier? Is studying for three or four subjects in great detail right in the modern world? Can standards, and pass rates, be sustained? One option already available to schools and students is the baccalaureate system. With reform of the 'gold-standard' A-level likely, and with qualification reform in Wales and Scotland already a reality, this unique book will be essential reading for anyone who needs to know about the post-16 qualifications debate. Covering national and international approaches, the IBO, curriculum reform,and political and educational imperatives the book including expert contributions by the leading figures in the bac debate from the HE, state and independent-schools sectors, as well as from political and research fields.

1
The resistance to reform: from Crowther to Curriculum 2000

Tim Pound

Introduction

A levels have proved to be remarkably resilient. Despite incremental changes to their structure and modes of assessment, their original function —essentially that of selection and exclusion—has remained substantially unaltered throughout their unprecedented 50-year history. Recently modularized and reformulated into two distinct stages, A levels continue to cast an elitist shadow over their vocational counterparts, and to define the standards against which alternative qualifications are invariably judged.

That they have retained their reputation for academic excellence in the rapidly developing context of post-compulsory education and training, however, arguably says as much about the English aversion to change as it does about the intrinsic merits of an exclusively academic curriculum. The fact that A levels have become the pedagogical equivalent of the ‘gold standard’, and that they have attracted rich, metaphorical labels such as ‘the jewel in the crown’ of the post-compulsory curriculum, clearly suggests the extent of the ideological support they have generated. More specifically, it may also explain why attempts to abolish them have been greeted in some quarters as emotively as a prospective negative referendum vote on the future of the monarchy.

One of the more obvious reasons for the establishment of this equation between A level qualifications and academic rigour undoubtedly stems from their original function as the principal rite of passage for university entry. When they were first introduced more than half a century ago, A level syllabuses—like those of their immediate antecedents, the School and Higher School Certificates —were dominated by university examining boards, with vested interests in both maintaining academic standards and, perhaps more importantly, ensuring the continuing viability of the three-year honours degree. In the absence of any vocational alternative, A level qualifications also became reliable indicators of an individual candidate’s employment potential, often putting even those sixth formers who had failed to secure the grades for university entry at a considerable advantage over the vast majority of the age group who had left school at 15 or 16. Their status was further enhanced by the fact that around 25 per cent of those who sat A levels failed their terminal examinations, and thus had nothing to show for two years’ study in the sixth form: this was a real, but less defensible, confirmation of their academic rigour.

The cumulative cost of preserving such elitist qualifications, in terms of failure and exclusion, has been considerable. But equally, success has come at a price, most obviously in the form of narrow and intense academic specialization with an exclusive bias towards either the arts or the sciences. This left the privileged minority leaving the grammar and independent schools across the country illequipped to deal with much beyond the anticipated route that the examinations had prepared them for—the single-subject degree course. As critics of the A level system have been quick to point out, the inherent weakness in such qualifications is their singularity—in other words, the fact that ‘there is no such thing as the A level curriculum’ (Young and Leney, 1997).

The choice of A level subjects has always remained voluntary and largely a matter of personal preference, and while traditionally specific combinations have been selected in response to university entrance requirements, students have never been compelled to study subjects that fail to match their perceived academic strengths and interests. Any attempt, then, to evaluate the A level system from the perspective of concepts like an ‘overarching framework’, ‘minimum core requirements’ or the mandatory selection of subjects from a number of discrete, epistemic domains, is therefore wholly inappropriate, since A levels have always managed to resist the imposition of such prescriptive labelling.

The proven capacity of the A level system to withstand repeated attempts to subsume it under a broader and more balanced curriculum and examinations framework provides the principal focus of this opening, context-setting chapter. While subsequent contributors to the book variously examine a range of baccalaureate-style qualifications and frameworks —each with the potential to exert a positive influence on the future development of a more inclusive and coherent English system—this chapter chronicles the wasted opportunities that have given rise to the inequity and curricular fragmentation which characterize the current state of 14–19 educational provision. It will begin by re-focusing attention on the Crowther Report, and in doing so, it will reaffirm the fact that concerns over the specialized nature of A level qualifications—and consequently, the comparative absence of breadth in the post-compulsory curriculum—began to surface almost from the moment of their very inception. For as the Crowther Committee discovered during the mid-1950s, when it considered, amongst other issues, the function of A levels in the post-compulsory curriculum, here was a systemic weakness that would prove not only impossible to ignore, but also extremely difficult to vindicate.

Crowther and the concept of subject-mindedness

When the Crowther Committee was first convened in 1956, barely five years had passed since the first A level certificates were awarded, and yet criticism of what was perceived as an excessively specialized academic curriculum, and its relevance to the country’s future economic and social needs, had already begun to manifest itself. Such concerns were implicitly acknowledged in the framing of Crowther’s remit, which had been to:

consider, in relation to the changing social and industrial needs of our society, the education of boys and girls between the ages of 15–18, and in particular, to consider the balance at various levels of general and specialised studies between these ages and to examine the interrelationships of the various stages of education.

(Ministry of Education, 1959:xxvii)

To its credit, the response of the Crowther Committee to the issue of raising levels of national productivity and social prosperity was quite farreaching, involving a number of policy recommendations to widen access to postcompulsory education. A four-fold expansion of the participation rates for 17- year-olds in full-time education was proposed, taking the figure to a projected 50 per cent of the age group by 1980. This was to be achieved through the raising of the school-leaving age to 16; the development of ‘local examinations’ for pupils ‘for whom external examinations below the level of the GCE may serve a useful purpose’ (Ministry of Education, 1959:88), effectively the Certificate of Secondary Education (CSE) in embryonic form (ibid: 83); and also through the expansion of the FE sector and the introduction of the ‘Junior College’—a blueprint for sixth-form and tertiary colleges—possessing, in the words of the Report, the ‘adult atmosphere of the technical college’ while offering ‘a much wider range of curriculum with terms of reference nearer to those of a school’ (ibid: 422).

However, when it turned its attention to a consideration of the upper-secondary curriculum—and in particular, the issue of A levels and academic specialization—the Crowther Committee displayed a stunning degree of complacency, a marked deference towards tradition and, in places, an untenable sense of logic. Arguing, on the one hand, that it was extremely unlikely that any student could be ‘really at home in the higher reaches of more than one or two subjects’, the Committee decided that what was at stake was ‘not whether specialization is desirable or unavoidable’, but rather, ‘when it should begin’ (Ministry of Education, 1959: 258). Yet on the other hand, comparisons with the United States and Scotland forced the Committee to concede that in both countries, students successfully followed a ‘much wider spread of subjects’ (ibid: 258). Similarly, a consideration of European systems proved to be equally disconcerting, forcing the Committee to accept that ‘On the continent of Europe, there is no question of dropping altogether the study of languages or history or mathematics or science’ (ibid: 258).

None the less, despite the endorsement of breadth implicit in these international comparisons—and despite conceding the fact that specialization in England could well act ‘as a constricting frame and not a liberating agent’ (ibid: 260)—the Crowther Report proceeded to assert that by the age of 16, academically-minded pupils in England inclined towards ‘subject-mindedness’ (ibid: 262). In the absence of any empirical evidence to support its claims, the report was moved to conclude that the ‘mark of the good and keen Sixth Former’ was someone who has ‘looked forward to being a science specialist, or a classic [sic], or a historian’ (ibid: 223).

Academic specialization was not only established as an innate yet peculiarly English phenomenon, it was also described in a language redolent of a more genteel, post-Romantic age which befitted its mid-19th-century cultural and pedagogical origins. For example, subject-mindedness was likened to a ‘spring from which the disinterested pursuit of knowledge swells’ (Ministry of Education, 1959:223), and those who entered the sixth form were defined as an ‘intellectual aristocracy’ and ‘adults capable of a reverence for knowledge, beginners in a lifelong quest for truth’ (ibid: 259).

As critics of Crowther’s defence of academic specialization have pointed out (Pound, 1995), the kind of language used here appears more indebted to the spirit of a liberal-humanist, philosophical tradition than to a mood of post-war optimism and reform. Moreover, the decidedly Arnoldian, antiutilitarian tone of such pronouncements is further reflected in the belief that courses of study that might prove ‘Vocationally useful in later life’ should be avoided in favour of those that guaranteed an introduction to ‘the fundamental process of thought and the greatest achievements of the human mind’ (Ministry of Education, 1959: 263).

Perhaps the one consolation for those who opposed narrow specialization lay in the Crowther Report’s insistence that subject-mindedness was, after all, only a transient condition, mysteriously emerging during what was then designated the ‘15–18’ phase, but afterwards susceptible to both correction and improvement through a process of self-discipline and further study. As the Committee put it: ‘If a boy turns that intellectual corner, as he often does at the end of his Sixth Form time, we can be sure that, narrow as his education may have been during the last few years, he will take steps to widen it as well as deepen it’ (ibid: 263). Arguably, the simple truth beneath this increasingly desperate and convoluted defence of academic specialization was that by retaining A levels in their contemporary form, the continuing viability of the equally specialized three-year undergraduate degree was ensured. Even the Crowther Committee itself, in one of its less guarded moments, argued that at very least, specialization ‘saves time in the total educational process from the infants’ school to the postgraduate course’ (ibid: 260–61). The extent to which this mundane consideration would prove a decisive, albeit underlying, factor in subsequent decisions to reject proposals to broaden A level studies ought not to be underestimated.

What is surely extraordinary about the legacy of the Crowther Report’s pronouncements on the future of the post-compulsory curriculum is not simply the extent of its devotion to an ostensibly Victorian paradigm of general education, but the way in which the kind of deference exhibited by its authors towards a narrow, traditional concept of academic excellence has remained such a potent obstacle to curricular reform in England. As a contemporary Times Educational Supplement editorial put it, those who compiled the report seemed ‘prisoners of conservative headmasterdom and dons ignorant and uninterested in educational matters’ (15 January 1960). And it concluded sardonically:

The trouble in England is that we boast about our very deficiencies. We think we’re terribly clever, in the sixth form and universities, to produce first degree scientists only 21 years old. In fact, this scholastic efficiency is being bought at the sacrifice of proper education.

(TES, 15 June 1960)

Of those educationists who criticized the Crowther Committee’s complacency over academic specialization, perhaps the most persistent was A D C Peterson, who had recently been appointed Director of Education at the University of Oxford. Dismayed by the Crowther Report’s empirical short-comings, Peterson was determined to prove that the concept of ‘subject-mindedness’ had no real basis in observable fact. With the support of the Gulbenkian Foundation, Peterson embarked on an enquiry into the issue of subject choice in the sixth form, publishing his findings in a brief report entitled Arts and Science Sides in the Sixth Form (1960). What his limited study eventually confirmed was that A level choice was almost wholly determined by university entrance requirements, and that given the freedom to follow their own academic interests, students would, in fact, opt for a broader range of subjects. Having thus exposed the Crowther Report’s deliberations on ‘subject-mindedness’ as blatantly misguided, Peterson proceeded to argue the case for introducing a four-subject A level framework to promote greater curricular breadth. Yet although his proposals attracted a considerable amount of interest (Pound, 1998), in practice they failed to secure widespread support both in the schools and, more crucially, within the universities.

As we shall see in Chapter 3, however, what subsequently arose out of Peterson’s critique of the narrow, specialized nature of the sixth-form curriculum was the development of what would become one of the most acclaimed, broad-based alternatives to A levels currently on offer—the International Baccalaureate (IB). The irony of this seminal initiative emerging in the wake of an official report which gave a ringing endorsement to the virtues of academic specialization should not be overlooked.

The quest for breadth in the post-Crowther years

Between the early 1960s and the mid-1980s a whole raft of initiatives to broaden the academic route was launched, but each continued to prove unacceptable to the two principal stakeholders in the A level system—the schools and the universities. As we shall see, what is notable about a number of these proposed reforms is their close affinity to the innovative, academic framework of the IB Diploma, developed in Geneva and introduced in 1968 with a six-subject curriculum at ‘Higher’ and ‘Standard’ level. In England, however, although the quest to introduce curricular breadth continued unabated, the culture of academic specialization proved virtually impossible to dislodge.

In 1962, for example, the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals, acknowledging the low levels of general education among first-year undergraduates, argued that university entrance requirements should be based upon a combination of two specialist subjects, supported by ungraded passes in three ‘general’ papers, including one in the recently-introduced ‘Use of English’ examination, and another in a foreign language. Despite being rejected by the Secondary Schools Examinations Council on the grounds that such measures would increase the examination burden on sixth-formers (1962), as Peterson himself remarked, such proposals amounted to ‘the first real break in the stranglehold of premature and one-sided specialisation’ (Observer, 7 May 1962). Similarly, when the Robbins Report appeared in 1963, with its much-vaunted recommendation for a significant expansion in the number of universities to cope with a projected doubling of the undergraduate population between 1963 and 1980, it was forced to acknowledge the damaging effects of premature specialization. Rejecting the case for extending the length of first degrees from three to four years, the Report nonetheless lamented the fact that ‘too many entrants cannot express themselves clearly in English, have an inadequate understanding of elementary mathematical principles and have made no significant progress in any modern language’ (Committee on Higher Education, 1963:76).

Within three years the first of a series of pro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes On the Contributors
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. The Resistance to Reform: From Crowther to Curriculum 2000
• 2. Towards a Structural Typology for Baccalaureate-Style Curricula
• 3. The International Baccalaureate
• 4. The French Baccalaureates
• 5. The Welsh Baccalaureate Two Models
• 6. The Graduation Certificate
• 7. Four Perspectives On Reform
• 8. A Baccalaureate System for the English Context