Why Michael Gove is trying to put himself out of a job setting A-levels

Michael Gove’s decision to hand back control of the examination system to the universities has been widely welcomed as the last, best chance to rescue the A-level. For decades, politicians have presided over a system in which such qualifications have been relentlessly devalued. The former “gold standard” has become the educational equivalent of the lira or the Laotian kip. The most visible sign that things were going wrong was the explosive growth of Mickey Mouse subjects (yogurt studies, anyone?). But the damage done to the core curriculum was even worse: the level of mathematical ability that would have earned a D or E at A-level 20 years ago now secures an A or a B. Under the last government, the implicit view was that the whole schools system was so incompetent that the only way to fix its flaws was to micro-manage from the centre. Mr Gove believes – rightly – that meddling politicians and Whitehall officials are the problem, not the solution. In January, he handed control of the information technology curriculum to industry and universities, rather than the exam boards and Whitehall. Now he is doing something similar across the system: in a letter to the exam watchdog Ofqual, he insists that he does “not envisage the Department for Education having a role in the development of A-level qualifications”. Handing the job back to the universities should certainly improve our exams. But what would also drive up standards would be for A-levels to lose their monopoly. In his letter to Ofqual, Mr Gove makes repeated reference to the need for greater “diversity” in the system. He hopes that getting the state out of the business of standard-setting will spur the growth of new qualifications – and enable Britain to benefit from a worldwide wave of educational innovation. In recent years, online learning has blasted off. Lectures from Khan Academy, a site that delivers school-style lessons via the internet, have been viewed 136 million times. Some of America’s top universities, such as MIT, have been putting their lectures online for years. The next stage is to provide testing and certification – in short, to compete with conventional exam boards and universities. One pioneer is Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist at Stanford University. When he opened up his classes to all-comers, he had 160,000 students register for an online qualification “within days”. And the technology involved is pretty basic. Some of his videos simply involve him drawing diagrams on a napkin, just like having someone explain something to you in a pub. He also offers continuous feedback, with students being set little tests as the lessons unfold. In essence, Thrun is delivering personal, world-class education to hundreds of thousands of people at almost no cost. Best of all, you can study for these qualifications anywhere, any time: his students include nursing mothers and soldiers on the front line in Afghanistan. MIT now offers a similar programme, MITX, which examines and awards qualifications to people taking its highly prestigious courses online. This kind of thing could end up doing traditional universities out of job – or at least radically changing what they offer. It is not just courses that are improving, but textbooks. Their quality has long been deteriorating, as exams dumbed down and teaching to the test flourished: why bother covering the subject as a whole, when the goal is to tick the right boxes in exams? Nature and Science, the two leading scientific periodicals, are so dissatisfied by the way politicians have made science teaching narrower and shallower that they are creating their own curricula. E O Wilson – a legend in biology – is working on an iPad course and textbook, “Life on Earth”, on which almost every “page” features animation, movies and tests, linking back to a social networking site and “homework server”. As well as being more interesting than rivals, it will be free, and continually updated. In Britain, the debate about education has long been about how to manage our decline. But Michael Gove is a transformer, not a manager – and by opening the door to innovation of the kind I’ve described, he is essentially trying to do himself and his department out of a job, to create a system in which good qualifications drive out bad ones through competition, without the need for meddling politicians. By proclaiming all GCSEs and A-levels to be of equal value, while permitting rampant grade inflation, the state gave schools an incentive to shop around for the easiest courses – as exposed recently by The Daily Telegraph. It reminds me of the sub-prime market, where traders competed to come up with products that would be rubber-stamped as AAA, but were secretly full of as much rubbish as they could get away with. Just as the financial crisis exposed all the problems that had been swept under the carpet, so Mr Gove is exposing the uncomfortable truths about our education system. But instead of pretending to be some kind of superman who can fix all the problems himself, he’s trying to set up the structures and incentives – such as free schools and a diverse, independent exam system – to turn education into a self-improving system. That’s a far more exciting prospect than a return to the bad old days of fake progress and fiddled figures.