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good intentions, the Schools Council achieved nothing by way of post-16 reform.
Both CEE and the Intermediate-level examination were terminally scuppered when in
1979, Mark Carlisle as the new Conservative Secretary of State for Education
announced, together with his opposite number in Wales, that A levels were to remain
unchanged for the foreseeable future.
Although excluded from the Schools Council’s schemes, during the 1970s the
examining boards themselves attempted to broaden A-Ievel students’ intellectual
horizons by devising a new A level in General Studies. The syllabus required a
knowledge of a range of disciplines, reading comprehension of a foreign language and
some mathematics plus the ability to construct an argument in essay form. The most
popular General Studies syllabus was that of the Joint Matriculation Board. However
even its success was limited because few university admissions tutors apart from the
northern five, of which the JMB was the offspring, recognised the subject. Because
“pupils and teachers had to be highly instrumental in their choice of A levels and
pursuit of good grades in specialist subjects” (Mathieson 1992: 191), General Studies
failed to gain a wide take-up in the nation’s sixth forms. Mathieson cites General
Studies as evidence of:
...the low level of everyone’s commitment to breadth. ...It had little currency
with university admissions tutors, ...little practical support and investment of
resources from heads and heads of subject departments and... slight recognition
by pupils.
(Mathieson 1992: 191)
This attempt by the Boards to broaden A levels by means of a syllabus proved only
marginally more successful than the School’s Council’s more ambitious schemes.
As for the Schools Council, by the end of the 1970s, as Plaskow points out, there was
virtually no significant involvement in its work by representatives of either the