Government blamed for A-level debacle

The blame for last year's A-Levels debacle has been laid firmly at the Government's door by an all-party group of MPs.

Its failure to run adequate trials of the version of A-Levels made up of AS-Levels and A2s introduced in 2000 caused the confusion that erupted last autumn, said the Commons Education Select Committee in a report.

The MPs did not call for the exams to be scrapped and replaced with a baccalaureate-style qualification, however - instead, they demanded a "period of stability" and urged "caution" in debates about the future of England's testing system.

Nearly 2,000 students got better results as a result of the re-grade ordered by the chairman of the Government's inquiry into what went wrong last year, Mike Tomlinson.

The committee took evidence from him, the exam boards Oxford and Cambridge and RSA (OCR), the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance (AQA) and Edexcel.

It heard from the exams watchdog the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, whose former chairman Sir William Stubbs was sacked by the then Education Secretary Estelle Morris at the height of the row.

The MPs also took evidence from headteachers' leaders who first raised the issue of bizarre grades going to their students, including AAU - unclassified, or fail - at A2 in subjects such as history.

All the students who had their grades boosted took exams set by OCR, which the committee said felt "pressurised" by the QCA into cracking down in order to avoid accusations of "inflation" of results.

The committee said: "On the evidence presented to us, we conclude that the events of last summer were not caused by the manipulation of the examination system but by confusion arising from the introduction of the A2 exam without adequate trials."

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