As a teacher and as a senior leader in a single sixth form free school and then a multi-academy trust with many A-level students, I have done my turn in managing the consequences of new A level qualifications. New schemes of work needed to be planned, updated resources purchased, seemingly endless debates about whether students would sit AS levels in Year 12 even if they no longer counted for the final exam.

I know that I was happier to engage in this work than some of my colleagues, because I happen to be a strong believer in the necessity of the curriculum changes. I sincerely hope the end of the resit culture will provide more time for students to develop coherent overviews of the material they are studying.

Even for staff more sceptical of the value of these changes, I suggest that there is good news: whatever you might think of the reforms, they are likely here to stay.

Like many teachers around my age, my own experience as a student and a teacher was of repeated change to qualifications. I was at sixth form through the last A-level shift in Curriculum 2000, in which the A-level was broken in two.

Once I became a teacher in 2006, I was immediately caught up fairly quickly in discussions about the introduction of modular GCSEs, which arrived in 2009. One of my most important tasks, when I became a head of department, was to reorganise our GCSE course to take account of the phasing out of that modular option by the coalition government.

Political priority

Teachers have been asked to work hard in this recent period to manage the consequences of these reforms. Unlike previous rounds of change, these are likely to stick. This is largely a matter of political priorities: it took considerable energy and focus from Michael Gove’s Department for Education to hold together the various players in the system to get this far.

There were splits within the universities, where subject tutors were keen that sixth formers should engage in deeper study in the time created by ending compulsory AS-level exams. Admissions offices, charged with selecting students for course, were concerned at the loss of externally-validated assessment data from those same AS-level exams. The length of the project, imposed by the scale of the changes, also required a consistent attention to the issue over a long period.

In light of Brexit and the recent general election - and barring a catastrophic logistical failure in the administration of the examinations - the DfE’s attention is now, rightly, elsewhere. The Secretary of State has made clear her focus is on activity to enhance social mobility, while within schools the need is for better curriculum materials and training to deliver the curriculum, not a new round of changes.

The steady countdown to the ending of our relationship with the European Union means that the skills agenda should take pride of place in the department’s thinking. This is presently embodied in the government’s planned review of funding in further and higher education, the creation of T-levels and the monitoring of the new Apprenticeship Levy.

Whatever the results for individual students, specific schools and even whole multi-academy trusts, these A-level reforms will be sticking around.

John Blake is head of education and social reform at the think-tank Policy Exchange, before which he was a state-school history teacher for 10 years.

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