This strange desire to strive for failure in our education system

Listening to Mr Woodhead I begin to understand, for the first time in my innocent life, the world of Berlin nightclubs and whips

I swear this is the last time I'm going to do this. Next year, when the A-level results are published, and the pundits and nostalgic presenters raise their inevitable, droning chorus of dismay over just how many kids seem to pass these days, they can do it alone. Maybe if more of them took time off wittering to raise children of their own – and to listen to what they say – we wouldn't have to endure this tedious ritual every bloody summer. As it is, I hope and believe that the public has almost stopped listening to their perennial jeremiad.

Almost. So let's start with Jeremiah's grandpa – Chris Woodhead. Having inevitably – and quite wrongly – accused the education minister David Miliband of incredible complacency (it does not seem to have occurred to Mr Woodhead that a lazy pessimism is just as complacent as a facile optimism), the former chief inspector of schools expressed his incredulity that one day every student might get a pass grade in their A-levels. It would, he said, make a mockery of the idea of examinations to differentiate between pupils. In the past Mr Woodhead has advocated a harder A-level exam that would fail more students, partly on the basis that "an examination that doesn't involve failure is a very peculiar examination... An education system must involve failure. Life involves failure".

This is a bizarre jumping-off place for an educational reformer. Of all the things that we might have a need for in the education system, the need for failure per se is, I think, the least obvious. We may well need more creativity, more innovation, more flexibility, more devolution and more choice, but to try deliberately to create more failure is simply perverse. When I listen to Mr Woodhead I begin to understand, for the first time in my innocent life, the world of Berlin nightclubs and whips.

The business of examination at school is not about creating failure or even about differentiating between pupils as such. It is about helping to guide pupils to the right and appropriate choices of further education, interest, career or vocation. Passing, failing and the awarding of grades are a means to that end – they are not ends in themselves. Interestingly the institution of the intermediate AS-level has provoked a proper debate about such guidance; a difficult AS maths examination last year led to a drop in the number of students subsequently taking A-level maths.

This filtering effect of the AS-level caused one conservative newspaper to lead its front page with the disapproving headline: "Pass rate soars as pupils play the system." The implication was that students were making life too easy for themselves by dropping subjects they found too tough. But in the old days people like me managed to do the same thing by calculating exactly what we needed by way of O-levels to enter university, and passing precisely that number and no more. I got French and maths O-level on the lowest grade of pass, and a pass also in the three subjects I was going to take at A-level. Everything else – including all my sciences – I flunked with a rock-bottom H. In fact the AS system may yet make such a cavalier approach much more difficult to get away with.

That was in a grammar school in the glorious early 70s. Perhaps it was that period that Ruth Lea, of the Institute of Directors, was thinking of when she said that, to her, "young people seem to know less than they did 20 or 30 years ago". Or for that era that Nick Seaton, head boffin of the right-wing Campaign for Real Education, was yearning when he noted that once again the results showed that girls were getting better results than boys. "It's good," conceded Mr Seaton, "that females are doing well," adding ludicrously: "(but) the extent of coursework is helping girls because they are more diligent. This is really unfair."

If Ruth Lea really thinks that young people know less that they did in, say, 1972, then it is time she actually met some. In fact they know far more. They have to. My 12-year-old daughter has to deal with a world that presents itself in a far more nuanced and complex way than did my world at that age. She can discuss and deal with concepts of personal and political morality at a level of sophistication that my generation simply could not have coped with. And what can one say about a past education system that produced Mr Seaton?

Ah yes, the golden years. Only 4 per cent of youngsters going into any kind of higher education, 40 per cent of all 16-year-olds leaving school with no qualifications whatsoever – not even the lowest grade of CSE pass in one single subject (now there's failure for you, Chris! There's differentiation!), substantial levels of adult illiteracy and innumeracy, and – every time the boom-bust cycle went to boom – a crisis in skills.

Oooooh, exhale the nostalgists, but what about the inferior courses that all these extra students now get to take? They aren't proper like the Greats degree Cedric read at Caius (pronounced Keys). All these Big Brother-reared dumbasses scrambling to get into media studies, where they will be taught exhibitionism and voyeurism by failed journalists before being released into a world that doesn't want more Vanessa Feltzes. Many of these courses are (naturally) substandard. They are either too vocational (sausage-factory, bound to lead to disappointment etc) or too academic (low quality, irrelevant etc).

We have heard all this before, as well. We heard it when the red-brick universities were expanded after the war, when the new campus colleges were built in the 60s, and when the polys grew in the 80s. More meant less. We heard it when students opted for sociology and psychology, when studies were combined and when you could write a science-fiction essay as part of your final degree mark. We heard it when non-standard entrants (mostly mature students who had failed their 11-plus back in the Dreamtime) were belatedly given their chance at universities. We hear it again now in the cry for a return to the very 11-plus that idiotically failed most of our parents and crushed their hopes.

Well this is, I hope, the last time that I shall allow myself to be goaded by it. It is not that many courses couldn't be improved. It was always going to be true that the rapid expansion in higher education would lead to some strange practices and some below-standard teaching. And there is clearly a substantial problem with the funding of some courses and the low levels of pay for academics.

But the most important word is "opportunity". The idea of an absolute division between vocational and academic courses, for instance, is increasingly absurd. Life isn't like that. A few courses (medicine or dentistry, for instance) may be strictly vocational, a few will be entirely discipline-based and many others will be somewhere inbetween. The need for retraining and the desire to make changes in one's life mean that we will require many points of entry into the higher education system. There are hundreds of paths through this wood – not one narrow road leading to the uplands and one highway leading to nowhere.

David.Aaronovitch@btinternet.com