Michael Gove has a bold new idea.  We should return to the education system of the 20th century, because the most pressing problem with education in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is the modular A-level.

It’s easy to see why he might say this.  It chimes well with his party’s pervasive nostalgia, and allows him to tinker industriously with the remaining aspect of the education system that can be changed in time for the next election.  It allows him to sabotage any historical benchmark against which his pet Free Schools and Sponsored Academies projects can be assessed: we may never know if his flagship programmes come to realise their many promises.

It’s harder to see why he might believe it.  The Curriculum 2000 reforms he proposes reversing are universally considered a success.  Universities gladly use AS results when assessing applications – far more reliable, Cambridge says, than teachers’ asserted predictions – and the curriculum of sixth-formers has broadened significantly.  The previously-unfocused lower-sixth year, which Gove wants to reinstate, was given a “real sense of purpose” by AS-levels, Ofsted reported in 2003.

Gove’s announcement is made more perverse by Ofqual’s announcement in November that this January’s exam sessions are to be the last.  It is even harder to see a credible motive for pressing on with radical reforms when their ostensible justification is in the process of being addressed.

But even the discussion of these proposals obscures the real debate.  Exam reform is by no means the most important problem in our education system.  It is a quick, politically-expedient fix for a misidentified problem.  Indeed, a recent report based on international data concluded that training and retaining high-quality teachers is more important than the system in which they operate; it cites Finland and South Korea, both “education superpowers” but with markedly different systems of education: one “relaxed and flexible”, the other “test-driven and rigid”.

Realistically, nobody can expect Gove to improve educational standards.  Any substantial reform takes more time to devise and implement than a government has in office: changes to sixth-form alone would require at least two years before the results could be analysed; changes to teacher training might take a generation. But he could at least avoid imposing additional obstacles to good teaching: it is perverse to force teachers to redesign overnight the courses they’ve refined for years, for little prospect of overall improvement.  To do so against so teachers’ and admissions tutors’ advice is to play politics with one of the few domains in which the UK continues to excel: it was, after all, ranked 6th in the world by the Global Index of Cognitive Skills and Educational Attainment last November.

Gove’s willingness to defy the experts and use ideological reforms of questionable merit to fuel his political career provides a strong case for removing education from the direct control of politicians.  The usual argument for such control is one of democratic accountability; yet for policy areas with such long delays between implementation and analysis, there can be no opportunity for incumbents to be evicted from office on their record.  Equally, there is little political incentive to seek long-term solutions from which, even if successful and not reversed by a successor, their creator would receive no political capital.

We would be far better served by a panel of experienced teachers, examiners, university admissions tutors and educational experts tasked with examining every aspect of our education system – from teacher training and professional development to the national curriculum, from primary school to university, for those who will take degrees, and those who won’t.  Scotland has been busily working at just such a review since 2003, and its “Curriculum for Excellence” will be implemented just before Gove’s reformed A-levels.  If the Scottish scheme succeeds, we should take note: perhaps key policies are best assembled carefully by experts, not overnight by politicians.