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are aimed at only the top 20 per cent of the ability range. But they also remain elitist in a far more profound sense. They embody in microcosm a political structure with fundamentally hierarchical, non-participatory and alienating tendencies. Organized by universities and subject associations and administered via the university boards, knowledge becomes congealed into discrete packets of subject matter which constitute a form of transmittable property.Teachers who pass on the certificated knowledge derive authority from it. Pupils who receive it become differentiated from others, as owners, and are given access to further rewards in consequence. Via the examination structure pupils and teachers are socialized into notions of competition and failure, of hierarchy and bureaucracy, of knowledge as a possession which differentiates, stratify and excludes.
Examination credentials help to make hard visible distinctions, they help to transform advantages which lead into inequalities which appear intellectual.
GCE A-levels
are now the major university selector, and the syllabus tends to represent the maximum pre-university teaching that cannot be crammed in, particularly in the sciences and older disciplines. The pressure of selection imposes excessive specialization on pupils.The narrowness of the examinations is such that half of the candidates who sit A-level fail, and in any case only one-third who take A-level will go on to a university or polytechnic degree course. Nevertheless, any proposals to broaden the sixth-form course, as to provide more subjects studied to a lower standard have brought the threat of university demands for more four-year courses to keep up degree standards.
The examination boards are therefore kept firmly under university control. Their overriding preoccupation with a particular view of standards and secrecy must inevitably restrict the involvement of teachers, the range and choice which can be offered in the syllabi, and the kinds of skills that can be tested. Teachers on the boards and panels tend to be older and from selective schools, or from upper forms and selective streams; and as many as one-third of the markers are not practicing teachers.
Choice can only be introduced into the papers at the cost of variability of standards. And innovation is slow because of the difficulties of signaling changes to the schools: teachers tend to use old examination papers as teaching devices, and to adopt textbooks geared to the examinations; The boards are not kept on their determination by competition: they borrow syllabi, and have largely regional catchments; and following criticism they brought their timetables into line, a move which prevented schools from entering candidates for more than one board examination and thus from direct and invidious comparisons of standards.
In any case switching boards or entering for several boards in different subjects is more expensive in cash, books and teachers and pupils time.
The boards offered teachers the option of a more participatory relationship in course construction and assessment where teachers who wished to do so might devise their own syllabi and assess their students work, with external moderation by the boards. However, the boards were strict about what they would accept. And more significantly, teachers proved reluctant to take up the offer.
Ironically, in spite of the rigidity imposed by concern to keep up standards, there was no adequate continuous cross-monitoring between the boards. Syllabi and patterns of assessment varied between subjects, between different parts of the same paper, between boards, and over the years, in ways which made continuity and comparison of standards virtually impossible to maintain or check. Evidence published recently by the boards in defense of the comparison of their certificates is by no means reassuring. Nor do examinations predict performance in other, unrelated subjects or in jobs in other fields, although this is the purpose they are often made to serve.
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