:::Education must be more than a rat race for university places:::

A study by London University’s Institute of Education published this week found that the relentless pursuit of top grades at GCSE and A-level "compromised" independent schools’ abilities to deliver an all-round education such as sport, drama and trips.

By James Priory

Published: 8:00AM BST 01 Oct 2010

Telegraph.co.uk

Some schools are forced to cut sport and official outings for final year students in favour of exam cramming, the report found. Photo: PA

The only time pupils spend outside the classroom, it seems, is queuing to get into the examination hall.

But the report’s authors also found that “anti-modular sentiment was more widespread than anti-modular action” because of the continued support for more regular assessment among students.

Though the voices in the wilderness might be getting louder, the road to league table success remains a devastatingly straight and narrow one.

Two years ago when A-level was re-launched nationwide, the heads of department at my own school, Portsmouth Grammar, saw an opportunity to make A-levels work for us rather than the other way round.

If we wanted our students to care about the subject and not the qualification we knew we had to create a public-examination-free year between GCSE and A-level.

Students would no longer therefore sit AS modules in Year 12 but would wait until January in Year 13.

We also wanted to encourage more students to complete their fourth subject as an A-level, rather than leaving it dangling at the end of Year 12. The reduction in most subjects from six to four modules made us feel that it here at last was a possibility to develop a broader, and at the same time more mature approach to sixth-form study.

Some students were understandably anxious; they knew they would be competing with students from other schools and colleges who would re-sit AS-level modules more often.

Some worried about applying for competitive university places without AS-level module scores to rely on.

And why should they study four subjects when most universities only showed interest in three?

Parents, however, were supportive and trusted that the school would not wish to jettison a proud track record by turning their children into unsuspecting guinea-pigs.

So how did we get on two years later?  ...read the rest of the article here.