A-level results: London thrives but North-South divide worsens

0:02Hi, I'm Charlie Duffield and welcome back to The Standard Podcast. If you're new here, hit follow and give us a rating. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. Coming up later in the show, find out about the history behind London's best working engineering museum and the invention which remains there to this day.

0:29But first, today London students have achieved the best A-level results in the country with almost a third awarded top grades. For example, over half of the pupils at Brampton Manor on Roman Road in East Ham achieved a full set of A-star or A grades, with dozens of pupils securing places at universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial and UCL. National figures show that the proportion of A-level grades marked A-star or A may have risen across the board, remaining above pre-pandemic highs. The best results we've had for a decade. Most of the children come in often with mum and dad, we give them an envelope, they open the envelope just like the old days, things haven't changed as quickly as you think, and then they see them and generally there's pure delight.

1:18Some surprises, mainly good news today. I mean there's a real delight when you see the children who've got the results they want, the school has helped them to get on to the university they want to do or to the apprenticeship that they want to get to, it's a real pleasure. We live our lives alongside these children for seven years this is quite an important moment. It's way better I think I've just like sort of gone from being better in some subjects being better in others they sort of change throughout the years and then to end up with this I'm really really happy. So now I'm going to University of Leeds in September to study Spanish and business as a joint honours course.

1:51That was head teacher Charles Fillingham and pupil Kaya Berry from Sully Hill School. However experts say that today's A-level results show that the gap between the best and worst performing regions appears to be widening. Miles Mcginley, head of the OCR exam board, said, What we have seen is inequalities looking worse rather than better. And on Thursday, Education Secretary Bridget Philipson vowed to tackle the yawning inequalities in educational attainment. Joining us now is Afia Poko Amampfo, a researcher at the Institute for Public Policy research think tank. What do you make of this year's A-level results?

2:30The news today actually has been largely communicated as a success story that A-levels have sort of returned to pre-pandemic levels. While that is positive, what's actually concerning is that there's a real north and south divide in the number of students awarded the highest grades and that's kind of reached record levels. It's contributing to an array wide attainment gap in the UK. So for example, London saw the highest proportion of entries awarded like an A or an A-star whilst the northeast of England had the lowest, it's gone lower since last year. So what we're seeing is that attainment gap is getting wider and wider.

3:01There are demographics of young people largely shaped by where they might live in the UK who will do very well year on year and those trends are getting better for those young people. But there are so many others that are being left behind and the trends for them are getting worse and worse so that gap is increasing and that disparity is really concerning for having an equal education system in the UK. And many of the students receiving their A-levels today would have been 13 or 14 years old at the onset of the pandemic. How has the legacy of COVID left its mark? So that kind of start into adolescence is a really key age for child development and for academia and for mental health development as well.

3:42So there's higher absence rates amongst students in the Northeast and some children are even still yet to return back to school full time since lockdown. There's been a kind of rise in social and emotional mental health needs. Children in the north of England can often experience higher levels of poverty and so it's kind of near impossible to feel fully focused and secure in your education if you're hungry or you're moving from temporary accommodation to the next. So unfortunately it's not surprising because we can see that these trends were there last year and the year before but what's really concerning is that they're getting worse.

4:15So what needs to happen to tackle the inequalities in education. Being in the state school comprehensive school education system, depending on where you live, you can have completely different experiences. The national funding formula for starts, like that is one that is already based on need, but it's clear that schools need more resources. Funding formulas like might not be kind of getting to young people who need it the most. So this is something that could be reviewed, potentially reformed. The government has committed to expanding the teacher workforce, which is brilliant. And there's a real need for getting new young people maybe straight out of university or career changes into initial teacher training programs so they can enter the workforce of teaching.

4:55But we want that expansion of the workforce to directly benefit schools in deprived areas, schools where students may have higher than average additional needs or may be struggling with what is happening outside of school like child poverty and poor well-being. Expanding the workforce but then also ensuring that when the new teachers are in the workforce that they're supported with professional development teacher training programs that they can keep on enhancing their skills really identify where young people might be struggling and additional support that they might need but I think also we need to kind of uplift some of the post-16 kind of routes that might be alternative to what some young people might want to go down for example A-levels were designed with university in mind and if young people don't make it to university this shouldn't have such a huge cost on their future and as a result of it still having quite a high cost many young people might become neat so they might become not in employment educational training as a result of the lack of opportunities if they don't quite get the right academic grades for higher education.

5:58So that's why the government should look into expanding a lot of their work they're already doing. So for example, on the youth guarantee, ensuring that every young person can have a job when they leave school. That's something that's only up to age 21. We think that's something that should be up to age 24. They should also support employers as well to recruit and train young people. They could do this through like wage subsidy programs. And we've seen governments do that in the past that have been relatively successful. And that's not to say that we shouldn't aim high for young people. Young people should be able to choose whatever kind of future they want for themselves, but we should open up the opportunities so that there isn't such a high cost for young lives if they choose alternative routes, or perhaps they don't quite achieve the grades that they might have needed for higher education.

6:43What should really be a key priority, first and foremost, is ensuring that school education is a good standard for every young person, no matter where they live. But also, once they get to that point where they're thinking about what their next step might be after school, that there's a range of options that are all accessible and there's no stigma attached to one option rather than another so that young people can make like the right decisions for themselves and can feel secure in their futures. And over on our Tech and Science Daily podcast, Rachel Abbott has been speaking to LinkedIn career expert Charlotte Davis about why A-Level Results Day is no longer a life-defining Silver Doors moment.

7:19Here's what she had to say. What we're seeing is job posts on LinkedIn mentioning apprenticeships are kind of up 5 % in the UK. The really important thing to note now is that A-level results day is no longer this kind of life-defining sliding doors moment. I think, you know, what our data is showing, there are more routes into a career. And that's definitely kind of evident in the fact that we're seeing more job postings with apprenticeships in it. And I think what this shows is a real major rethink in how school leavers approach their first career steps. And you know, it's really kind of reassuring to know that there are many routes into a career that don't just require a degree.

7:59And there are thousands of jobs on the platform on LinkedIn at the moment that don't need a degree. In fact, it's gone up from last year. You know, getting your A-level results is such a big moment. I can remember that the moment before I opened that envelope. But I think the good thing to know and the really reassuring thing to know now is that there are multiple options. There are ways to build your skills. There are ways to build your connection and this is just one part of your journey.

8:26Let's go to a break. Coming up in part two, the little known museum in the capital which encourages you to smash up and break things. We'll see you back here in just a moment.

8:47Welcome back. In this week's Hidden London we're heading south of the Thames to a renaissance building that wouldn't look out of place on a Venetian canal side. Situated in Southwark, very close to the Tate Modern Gallery, you'll find Karkaldi's testing works, a temple dedicated to destruction. It opened in 1873 and is the earliest purpose-built independent commercial materials testing laboratory in the world. And it still houses the main machine that it was designed for. To find out more, I spoke to John Darlington, director at the World Monuments Fund. John, who is David Kirkcaldy? Tell me more about him.

9:25David Kirkcaldy was a Scott. He was born in Dundee in 1820. He was what you call a late bloomer because he apprenticed at a shipyard in Glasgow called Robert Napier and Sons at the age of 23. And normally you apprentice when you're sort of in your mid-teens. He was a talented man. He created beautiful drawings, actually. And there's one which is held in Greenwich's collection, which is of a boat called Persia, which is the first iron hulled vessel ever built for Cunard. And David Cicolde actually managed to get that picture shown in the Royal Academy summer show. And I think there's only ever been one engineering drawing in that show, and that's his.

10:05Worth a look. The latter part of his career at Napier's, however, he was very much involved in testing things because here's a big shipbuilding company. They don't want their ships to fail. It's pretty crucial to their business. So Napier's role was to test the wrought and iron and steel for Napier's ships. And if you imagine this is a time of great Victorian invention, great industrialization, so the demand for this testing work was considerable. He eventually leaves Napier's, and in 1861, his starts are on his own, decides he's sufficiently nerdish, interested in this topic about testing, to say, I want to set up in business.

10:42So he moves eventually down to, where else, but London. and he begins his own business in London, testing machines, testing equipment, testing bridges, testing arches for customers across the world. And there is a very powerful machine at the centre of this all, isn't there? There is. At the heart of this machine, in this purpose-built building, is a universal testing machine. That's what it's called. It doesn't sound very exciting, but believe me, it is. It's like a whale of a machine under 14 meters long, weighs 116 tons. And the idea of this universal testing machine is to test all kinds of things, but mainly metal, mainly wrought and cast iron and steel, test them to see how long they'll last under pressure.

11:24So it tests for compression, for tension, torsion and stretch, all kinds of things. And I always struggle when someone says, oh, this can test up to 450 tons of pressure. So I've translated that into my world and essentially 450 tonnes of pressure equals 62 London double-decker buses, one on top of another, put on top of your digital phone screen. And this is not one, this is one of several testing machines, because there are other machines in the building which test for crushing and stretching and battering and shattering and twisting and denting. It is truly a temple for destruction. So what does this site tell us about our industrial past?

12:04The things which are tested there also tell us something about the world in which the Victorians and then later his son and grandson take on the business, the world in which they all lived. Because commissions included testing for the Blackfriars Bridge, which is where I begin in my London commute each day. He did work for someone called Alfred Krupp. He's a German, mainly arms manufacturer, known as the Cannon King. I'll resist the temptation to say business boomed, but it did. there was Hammersmith Bridge. There's a real irony there. So he tested the original Hammersmith Bridge. And of course, the bridge today is now not able to be used fully because it's failing.

12:45He tested Eads Bridge, which was the longest bridge in the world in Mississippi in the United States. And famously, he also tested something called the Tay Bridge after a disaster in 1879, when 60 people died in an infamous event. And he actually got to the clue about why the bridge failed. So an extraordinary man and an extraordinary museum. And what is the museum like to visit? They have regular openings and Kikuli's factory closed in 1974. The Kikuli Testing Museum was subsequently established and if you imagine it's perhaps less seen nowadays museums have got much more kind of contemporary but there used to be a time when museums had signs everywhere saying please do not touch, fragile, don't touch.

13:30And what I love about this Cacordy Testing Museum is it does the complete opposite. Their strapline is almost, we want you to break something. So go along, you'll have a smashing time. Finally, do you have anything else to add? Another fascinating thing that Cacordy set up was that he had within the building, him and his son and grandson, they actually established a museum of fractures. So within the building, they had a whole set of designs which had failed under their testing. Go there, and if you're a client, you can see we managed to test this destruction or this didn't work. So it was very useful as a marketing tool.

14:07The irony of that, of course, is that Museum of Fractures was finally destroyed itself by bomb damage during World War II. So again, another irony from this fascinating place.

14:24And that's The Standard. For all the latest news, head to standard.co.uk. If you'd like to get in touch, please do drop us a line at podcasts at standard.co.uk. We'll be back here tomorrow at 5pm. We'll see you then.