The crackdown on unconditional university offers is absolutely needed

Imagine you’re a headteacher. How on earth do you explain this? Suddenly, your sixth-formers’ exam pass rate has collapsed from 74 per cent to just 14 per cent.

This was the horror show discovered by one head in the north of England on Thursday, upon opening the school’s A-level results.

So many of its students had received unconditional offers to attend university – meaning they did not need to hit any grade targets – that they had simply stopped coming to classes, let alone bother turning up for the exams.

Huge increase

There are three reasons for the explosion in unconditional university offers – now 1 in 4 of all offers outside Scotland, leaping from just 3,000 in 2013 to 68,000.

First, students pay up to £9,250 a year in tuition fees, creating a fierce marketplace for higher education, as well as a stronger consumer mentality among students: what am I getting for my money?

Second, the limit on the number of students a university can admit has been lifted – and so in turn has the amount of tuition fee revenue it can raise.

Lastly, the population of 18-year-olds is falling. So it is a buyer’s market, and universities must take extreme measures to induce talented teens to choose them over rivals.

Too far

There can be good reasons for making unconditional offers: reducing exam stress for specific individuals; acknowledging extenuating circumstances; and to mature students who already have their qualifications.

But this has gone too far. Usain Bolt didn’t stop running at 90 metres.

This year’s farce shows up the UK’s unreliable, over-complicated and unjust university admissions process. It distracts from the achievements of hundreds of thousands of teenagers who kept working.

If large numbers of students are giving up before their exams, future students and their parents will struggle to accurately gauge the quality of a school’s teaching.

And those students taking it easy will find university harder. If they drop out they will have no A-level qualifications to fall back on, despite being among the smartest in their year group.

The crackdown on unconditional offers, revealed in our cover story today (page 4), is a sensible response.

Read more on education:

When is GCSE results day 2018, how do the new numerical grades work and why did they change?

An Oxford college employed a monk who abused a boy at Ampleforth College, and knew for six years before sacking him

This is how to get a well paid job without going to university

The post The crackdown on unconditional university offers is absolutely needed appeared first on i.

from Football – i https://ift.tt/2L2VT1v