Core academic subjects disappearing from many state schools

Nick Gibb has attacked the Government after new figures revealed that, in many state secondary schools, no A-level pupils are entered for core academic subjects such as Maths, History and the Sciences.

The Shadow Schools Minister described the news as "extremely worrying", pointing out that Labour's league tables encourage weaker schools to push pupils away from the traditional subjects towards alternatives that are less valued by universities and employers.

Nick reiterated our plans to reverse this trend by giving more weight to the most valued subjects, which provide the rigorous academic training that enables children to succeed across a number of fields later in life, and added:

"Ministers like to pretend that employers and universities value all A-levels as highly as traditional academic subjects but it simply isn't true. The Government's flawed league tables incentivise weaker schools to push pupils away from the traditional subjects towards less crunchy alternatives. In doing so they are cheating those children, many of whom are from more deprived backgrounds."