9th August 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
Another organisation has recently criticised Michael Gove’s plans to change the A-level system. After Cambridge University criticised the plans two weeks ago, it’s now the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education (Acme) which has warned against the plans. The chair of Acme, Professor Dame Julia Higgins, thinks that the changes could result in a drop in the number of students taking A-level maths.
When the A-levels were changed in 2000 there was a 19% drop in the number of students choosing to study Mathematics at A-level, the system was changed again in 2004, and it was six years before the numbers recovered to the levels before the change.
The AS-level system is seen as a way to encourage students to experiment in their first year of A-levels, with many students taking four or five subjects, before cutting down to three in their final year, commonly known as A2s. It’s not clear why Maths in particular would be so affected, but in a recent letter to the government, published in the Times Educational Supplement, Higgins stated “We feel it is very important that we warn you that implementing such a policy runs a genuine risk of repeating the collapse in the numbers studying A-level mathematics”.