A Level languages - and other subjects. Some thoughts following a Facebook posting by a Midlands teacher.

In 1966, I started work on my A levels - reading La Peste - almost the day after O levels had finished. They were what I wanted to do, and La Peste as a starting point is a big ask. This is, I think, the key to A level and subsequent academic success - the student must want to do it.

My A level teacher, Francis Holmes - earlier generations of pupils called him Fuss - gave every encouragement to those with that attitude, and to the end of his days - I last met him in his late 90s - did not understand why others did not share it. He saw his work as very worthwhile, but almost none of his pupils - "even the bright ones, those who could handle the subjunctive" - had not developed the ability to speak fluent French. I didn't think my French was particularly good, though those with more fluency tended to have had wider experience of the language, for example by having parents in the diplomatic service, but it was as good as I could make it. But if I was in the best handful over a 50 year career - he carried on working into his 70s - what was going wrong?

As an inspector, I saw, from time to time, the same attitude in minority subjects in sixth forms. One sixth form, that otherwise had serious problems, had a course in social care, run by a single teacher on the main scale, that used exactly the same seminar format that I met at university, encouraging students to read and contribute - a class library of journals as well as books - and so fostered the same attitude. The students were interested, wanted to work, and succeeded. Long Road Sixth Form College, in Cambridge, has the same approach, with the same attitudes, and highly successful results.

This is, in the end, the only way to get students to do A level with any sense of satisfaction - they have to want to, and we have, first, to get them to want to, by providing teaching that enables them to succeed and enjoy their work - whatever their intellectual capacities - and so build a basis for success at a higher level. Present conditions of work in most schools are making this next to impossible. The exceptions are well known, and Michaela, The Power of Culture, is the clearest statement we have of how to build on them.