Revolutions in education take time. Michael Gove knows that only too well and it is unclear just how long he has to achieve what he wishes to. But to his credit, two years in, we are starting to see some encouraging signs. Last week's marginal decline in the number of A* and A grades at A level compared to 2011 might seem minor, but it is arresting a 21 year trend of suspicious grade inflation.
This week's focus will be GCSEs. I confess to a greater personal interest here as I enter the fray of parental involvement in exam results for the first time - I wait with trepidation for my elder daughter's grades. But however well she does - or badly - will not disguise a fundamental unease I have, both professionally and personally, with the qualification. I will congratulate or commiserate with her as I will with boys at school, because they have worked toward a standard and it is an academic rite of passage, with consequences for choices and opportunities in the future. They cannot choose what exams they are forced to sit. But I ask the question: what are GCSEs for?
They are not for challenging the brightest. Last month's report "Educating the Highly Able" published by the Sutton Trust was devastatingly critical of how we fail to identify and stretch the brightest pupils in our schools. The highly able have become a neglected group. There is insufficient space within the curriculum, especially since the introduction of the ultra time-consuming controlled assessment approach, for genuine enquiry and academic inspiration. At the other end of the academic scale, we continue to hear the agonised appeals from business leaders that the school leavers of today do not possess the basic skills required in the work place. What we have in place at the moment fails to provide a 'catch-all' way of measuring different types of achievements: thankfully, another of Gove's reforms has been to emphasise some core subjects at the expense of 'cake-decoration' or equivalent.
A rising school leaving age means that we no longer need a terminal test at 16 to provide evidence of achievement. And the House of Lords is telling us that we should make Maths compulsory beyond 16 (as a fan of the IB, I welcome that) so we might not even need an exam to make our A Level choices simpler in quite the same way. And still we put the nation's 16 year olds through the mill. Why?
One of the flaws of GCSE is that it is a 'catch-all' system. It seeks to provide a method of testing all abilities . . . and fails both ends of the spectrum. It aims to provide both training for future academic endeavour and the basics skills required by employers . . . and fails on both fronts.
But replacing such a system is inherently difficult. Until perhaps, we understand something fundamental. We need to achieve three things from a national educational process. First: the rigour of academic training and preparation in order to enable students to thrive in a university environment. Second: the basic skills required for economic utility and employability. Thirdly, more intangibly and therefore all too easily ignored, we want each generation to be imbued with the values, experience, heritage, ideas, and cultural framework to enable them to be the responsible citizens of tomorrow.
It makes absolutely no sense to test the first in the same way as we test the second. No one in their right mind would test the third at all, and nor would they allow public exams to stultify our schools day-to-day in such a way as to squeeze out the third. And yet we persist with GCSEs.
They do provide one useful service. I understand Michael Gove's dilemma: he needs to have targets, benchmarks, league tables, analysis. They speak of competition; they create expectations; they allow the necessary stick to be wielded in the face of under-achievement; they can illustrate failure and exemplify progress. But there is a huge irony. A flawed system, with little else going for it, is used to measure flaws in the system. And that does not seem fair on any generation of 16-year olds. Two wrongs don't make a right. There must be a better way.
The author is Head Master of Bedford School