England’s A-level traces back to a wartime committee that wanted its predecessor gone. In June 1943, with the Second World War still raging, a committee led by the educationist Sir Cyril Norwood recommended abolishing the Higher School Certificate. The exam that replaced it, the General Certificate of Education Advanced Level, was first sat in 1951 and is still taken today.
more
What the Higher School Certificate was for
The Higher School Certificate, sat by 18-year-olds, had existed since 1918 alongside the School Certificate, which 16-year-olds took. It did three jobs at once. It measured the work a pupil had done in the sixth form, it served as the university entrance test, and it was increasingly used to decide who received a state scholarship to study.
Few pupils ever sat it. Compulsory schooling ended at 14, so most children left before taking the School Certificate at all, let alone staying on for the Higher School Certificate two years later. The University of Buckingham’s Professor J R Shackleton has argued that most pupils between the wars left school with no certificate of their achievements whatsoever. The Higher School Certificate, in other words, was built for the small number heading to university from grammar schools and public schools, not for the country’s pupils generally.
Why the Norwood committee wanted it gone
R A Butler, then president of the Board of Education, appointed the Norwood committee in October 1941, in the middle of the war, to consider the future of secondary school exams. Sir Cyril Norwood, formerly head of Bristol Grammar, Marlborough and Harrow, chaired it. Its report, submitted in June 1943, was blunt about the Higher School Certificate’s roots. The exam, the report said, carried the “traditions” of grammar schools, public schools and universities, which meant only small numbers ever took it and kept it tightly bound to university examinations.
The committee’s ambitions went beyond killing one exam. It warned that external testing was “having a cramping effect upon the minds of teachers and pupils”, and it wanted teachers assessing their own pupils rather than sitting them through more national papers. That call for teacher assessment proved far less influential than the report’s plan for grammar, technical and secondary modern schools.
What arrived instead
What the government introduced after the war, in 1947, was much less radical than Norwood had proposed. The General Certificate of Education brought in ordinary, advanced and scholarship levels, with the first sitting in 1951. O-levels and A-levels replaced the School Certificate and the Higher School Certificate that year.
The new exam kept much of the old one’s shape. University exam boards ran the A-level, just as they had run the Higher School Certificate. The education historian Professor Gary McCulloch describes it as a system built for “a small, elite group, mainly from grammar schools”, feeding into a similarly small group of universities. A name had changed. The population it served largely had not.
The exam that outlasted its rivals
What followed proved the A-level unusually durable. The Certificate of Secondary Education came and went from 1965. O-levels and CSEs were both folded into the GCSE in 1988. General National Vocational Qualifications arrived in 1996 and fell by the wayside. The Diploma, proposed as a rival qualification for 14 to 19 year olds, was later abolished. The A-level has been in continuous use since 1951. It has survived reform after reform aimed at the rest of the system around it.
That longevity has not settled every argument. Tes notes that the A-level’s longest-standing handicap, its lack of breadth, has still not been addressed. Seven decades on, the exam Norwood wanted scrapped is long gone.
