Top private school ditches A-levels for 'challenging' exams
![](https://static.standard.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2012/01/03/09/westminsterschool_415x275.jpg?crop=8:5,smart&quality=75&auto=webp&width=1024)
London's leading private school is abandoning more key A-levels and GCSEs to allow pupils to study "more stimulating" courses.
Westminster School is top of this year's independent school GCSE league table and second in the A-level ranking but has abandoned conventional exams in some subjects including science, English and languages.
Stephen Spurr, headmaster of the £19,000-a-year school, criticised reforms to GCSEs and warned that Britain's "feedback society" could damage young people's education in the drive to eradicate failure.
Dr Spurr said: "We are a feedback society now. We are no longer a failure society. It's no bad thing that we try to improve as long as we are not trying to be hypocritical and improving on lower standards.
"If we are dumbing down syllabuses and people do get better and better then that is selling young people short."
Westminster teaches the "Pre-U" in English literature, Latin, Greek, Russian, history of art, German, Spanish and French. First results are due next year. In a growing number of subjects, the school is dropping GCSEs in favour of the International GCSE, a qualification that has been likened to traditional O-levels because it involves no coursework and exams taken after two years. IGCSEs are effectively banned in state schools because they do not fit the Government's national curriculum.
Dr Spurr criticised the division of GCSEs into bite-sized modules for preventing pupils from making connections between topics. New science GCSEs designed to make the subject more relevant undermined their academic rigour, he suggested.
"We do a lot of IGCSEs now. The core syllabus was more intellectually interesting. Teachers who love their subjects and pupils who are bright much more enjoy this syllabus and therefore they are likely to do better."
Westminster is among a growing band of schools to drop A-levels in some subjects, favouring the new Cambridge University Pre-U course. It is seen as more intellectually challenging and requires sixth-formers to take all their exams at the end of a course. A-levels have been modular since 2000.
"We are going to see increasing fragmentation of school-leaving exams," Dr Spurr said. "We are seeing the difference between the state sector and independent sector."
Dr Spurr was speaking as Evening Standard league tables ranked the top 200 independent schools in London and the South-East which released GCSE results this year.
Boys at Westminster achieved A* or A grades in 98 per cent of their GCSE exams this year.
The school was also second in last week's independent school A-level ranking, with 98 per cent of exams graded A or B.
MORE ABOUT