A comprehensive failure?

The dilemma of a drop in applications from maintained schools to study sciences at universities goes much further and deeper than suggested in Trends in Higher Education (June 10). The true fault line for A-level achievement is not state versus private but selective versus comprehensive.

Private schools and grammar schools are in a different league of achievement when compared with comprehensive schools.

The collapse of standards in modern languages and hard sciences is the more visible form of a general collapse of standards in comprehensive schools.

In my experience of privately tutoring A-level English and history, this affects learning generally and the "better" comprehensive no less than the others.

There is an acute problem here for the state because it goes deeper than any change of policy arising from a change of government. All political parties continue to support comprehensives despite their dismal record.

They are in a policy doldrums, unwilling to remove the remaining grammar schools yet aware that the policy measures of the past nearly 20 years - the move to GCSEs, broader A levels, the National Curriculum and assiduous testing and inspection and the managerial revolution - have all failed. The next idea is to move to academies or specialist schools in the vague hope that some rejigging of the schools without removing their non-selective status will do the trick.

The basic problem is the absolute ruling-out of the use of selection in comprehensives. Yet the best results that comprehensives achieve at A level are due to the minority of students who make it through the sixth form. On this basis, comprehensives are selective, but they still can not rival the selective sector.

Those who think that the Government "must commit to working with the independent sector... to reverse the drift" must be warned. Since the Government has made an unholy mess the more closely it has intervened in education, is it wise for the private sector to invite it in to create further shambles?

Nigel Probert
Porthmadog