I know a columnist should never start off with words like this but I am not sure what we can deduce from this year’s A-level results.

OK, the pass rate stays the same at 98.1 per cent and the number of A* and A grade passes went down slightly, from 25.9 per cent to 25.8 per cent.

Welcome to the world of “comparative outcomes”, where exams regulator Ofqual decrees that this year’s exam results should remain the same as the previous year’s.

They do add a rider that this should be the case unless there is proven evidence of an improvement in the quality of papers - but it seems most exam boards fear the wrath of the regulator descending on them if they show a marked year-on-year improvement in exam results.

The result is an almost Kafkaesque situation whereby ministers are demanding schools improve year-on-year, but the edict from the exam regulator makes it impossible for them to do so.

Of course, there has been compelling evidence in the past of a “dumbing down” of standards - most caused by the competition from the exam boards to sign up clients for their particular papers.

To my mind, the best way of dealing with this would be to reform the exam boards, and have just one single board for GCSEs and A levels. Former education secretary Michael Gove went halfway down this road by proposing the exam boards bid for each subject - in other words that you could have one board supply all the history papers and another, say, science subjects. He was put off from pursuing it by threats of legal action.

I don’t often say this but I don’t think his proposals went far enough. Go the whole hog and just have one exam board. Other countries succeed with that system and, until we follow that path, it will be very difficult to tell whether standards are improving, stagnating or going down.

The near-terminal decline of language-learning

One thing we can tell from this year’s results, though, is that the sorry decline in the number of pupils taking languages at A level is still declining. In fact, it has reached a record low.

The number of candidates taking French, still the most popular language, has declined to 9,672 which compares to 31,261 in 1992, and is a 6.4 per cent drop on 2015.

The story is the same for German and even Spanish - which has been the only success story in recent years. Even the languages where we are putting most effort into encouraging growth, like Mandarin, are showing a decline, down 8.1 per cent to just 2,849.

One of the reasons cited by headteachers for the decline is the difficulty of filling modern-language teaching posts in schools. The subject was axed at GCSE level by many schools when Tony Blair’s government decreed in 2002 that it should no longer be compulsory for 14- to 16-year-olds. 

That is not the whole story, though. As Professor Alan Smithers, head of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham, puts it:  “We have got rather used, as Britons, to other people speaking our language.”

It almost seems pointless to trot out the reasons why we should improve the language take-up in schools, since they have been stressed so often to no avail, but here goes. If you are involved in negotiations over a new contract with a foreign country, it is only polite to make an effort to speak that country’s language. You will find it goes down well and - as has been stressed before - the UK will be involved in far more of these negotiations in future now that we are going down the Brexit route and need to pick up more contracts fast as we can no longer rely on being a member of the EU.

Richard Garner was education editor of The Independent for 12 years, and has been writing about education for more than three decades

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