'Critics of A-levels are dewy eyed'

A new row erupted today over A-level pass rates after the school standards minister claimed there was no evidence they are easier than they used to be.

David Miliband accused those who claimed exams have got easier in the past 20 years of a "dewy-eyed" view of the past driven by "emotion and prejudice".

Writing in today's Times, he also claimed that two recent influential independent studies had shown there was "no data" to show that A-levels had been watered down.

He writes: "Emotion and prejudice fuel the cry that standards have fallen. The key point is that there is nothing in mass achievement that holds back excellent performance."

Critics, he said, were harking back to the time before the major expansion of universities in the 1990s, when only the best 10 per cent of the population were educated to degree level as opposed to the 40 per cent today.

The Institute of Directors, which says it has noticed a marked drop-off in graduate standards, described his claims as a "joke".

Shadow education secretary Damian Green dismissed Mr Miliband's comments as "a tirade of abuse" and told Radio 4's Today programme: "We need an independent inquiry ... to settle once and for all this question of standards over time."

In the Evening Standard today, Richard Jenkyns, professor of Classics at Oxford, says new undergraduates are now illprepared for university.

He writes: "We have had to adapt our teaching because many applicants come with less knowledge than they once did."