In praise of final exams

When it comes to education, reforms rarely stick. Fashions shift, governments come and go, and yesterday’s Great Leap Forward is quietly shelved in favour of the next Big Idea. Remarkably, the return of linear A-levels in England has endured a full decade – and with little sign of reversal.

In 2015, then education secretary Michael Gove did the unthinkable. He dismantled the modular A-level system – a fiddly regime of bite-sized units and endless resits – and reintroduced something almost daring in its simplicity: final exams. All of them. At the end. Imagine that – students actually expected to master an entire subject, instead of just coasting from one narrow module to another. Even as Gove’s critics huffed that this was ‘Victorian’, he pressed on, arguing that a return to real rigour was long overdue.

Bizarrely, it took a Conservative to make studying Marx compulsory on the A-level politics syllabus. This was a statement of academic seriousness. Knowledge now mattered, and that meant not cherry-picking the politically convenient. Gove gambled (rightly) that many teachers and parents were tiring of soft standards and grade inflation. He made the case instead that education should be about learning something difficult and worthwhile.

As someone who taught through the modular era, I remember what it replaced. Exams became shorter and more predictable. Students learned the tricks of the mark scheme rather than the substance of the subject. Essay questions devolved into sentence-completion exercises. The return to linear assessment reversed that decline. Students, once again, had to think long-term, draw connections and – God forbid – remember things.

Fast forward to 2025, and even Labour seems content to leave Gove’s reforms in place. Education secretary Bridget Phillipson recently praised the ‘deep and rigorous’ curriculum they led to.

Gove’s reforms – and their ripple effects – were not limited to A-levels. GCSEs were similarly stripped of their modular fluff, bringing a new seriousness to the end of secondary school. Key stage three – once a holding pattern before the ‘real work’ of year 10 – has now been reimagined as a space for learning foundational knowledge. The idea that academic challenge should be delayed until pupils are older has lost its grip. In history, pupils now study sweeping narratives from year seven. In English, extended writing has returned with a vengeance.

Teachers’ department meetings, once devoted to colour-coded spreadsheets and tedious ‘data drops’, now include actual discussions about curriculum content. What are we teaching? Is it any good? Does it stretch the students? These questions would once have sounded eccentric. Now they’re mainstream.

It’s not just the students who’ve had to raise their game. Teachers are being hired and developed for subject expertise again. If you’re teaching physics, it helps to know some physics.

Ofsted, too, has quietly reoriented itself. Its post-2019 framework places curriculum coherence at the centre of school inspections. These now sniff out whether schools are actually teaching something worthwhile – and whether pupils are remembering any of it.

Of course, the old ‘progressive’ orthodoxy hasn’t disappeared. Some still view challenging content as elitist and presume disadvantaged pupils need a gentler touch. But the evidence increasingly suggests the opposite. Working-class students don’t benefit from being talked down to. They benefit from being taught up – exposed to the same demanding material as their better-off peers, with the right support to access it.

The UK’s international standing in education has also improved. In the latest PISA rankings, we sit comfortably above the OECD average in reading, maths and science. Coincidence? Perhaps. But it would be hard to argue that a more coherent and ambitious curriculum hasn’t helped.

There’s still a long way to go. Curriculum planning needs continued investment, and teacher development must keep pace with rising expectations. But an important principle is now settled: knowledge isn’t optional – it’s the heart of education. And if we’re serious about social justice, we need to stop patronising children and start teaching them properly.

Ten years ago, Gove’s reforms were mocked as a nostalgia trip for grammar-school boys. Today, they look like one of the few enduring achievements of 21st-century education policy. Linear A-levels and final exams didn’t just change the exam timetable. They changed the culture of our schools for the better.

Neil Davenport is a writer based in London.