A Levels


As a qualification that prepares international students for university and a future career, A Levels have much to recommend them. Jon Wingfield, deputy head of senior school at Brighton College Bangkok, explains.


H


aving worked in a school that offered both International Baccalaureate (IB) and A Level courses for sixth-form pupils, I’ve found that it can be frustrating to listen to the perennial debate about the two – a debate that must simply serve to confuse parents trying to make the right choices for their children.


The truth is that both qualifications are universally


recognised, respected and – providing you are successful – equally likely to get you into the university of your choice, irrespective of which subject you may be applying to study and in which country you are looking to study it.


By way of example, I spoke to a parent recently who was not alone in being convinced that his daughter stood a much better chance of getting into a university in the US if she did the IB, and that A Levels only really prepared pupils for universities in the UK. However, like many other UK independent schools, Brighton College is now an international family of schools, all offering A Levels to internationally minded pupils who are likely to find themselves studying, working and living in a variety of countries throughout the globe. Whereas the majority of those at Brighton College UK will end up studying traditional subjects such as medicine, mathematics and economics at Russell Group universities in the UK, recent destinations of our international pupils have also included DePaul University, in Chicago, La Universita Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, in Milan, and 43 Air School, in South Africa. The subjects they will read range from Mandarin and linguistics to criminology and pilot studies.


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OPENING DOORS TO OPPORTUNITY There are a number of good reasons why A Levels open such diverse doors; apart from the fact that they are academically challenging and so have almost universal credibility, the curriculum is based on the development of key transferable skills. Pupils are recognised for their ability to use what they know, think critically and solve problems, rather than simply for how much they know.


Universities and employers will tell you that their challenge is not to find school leavers who know everything already, but to find those who are intellectually curious and can adapt to whatever situation they find themselves in. As a consequence, you do not have to have studied law at A Level to read law at university, and pupils who opt for A Levels in mathematics, further mathematics, physics and economics do not restrict themselves to courses and careers in those areas, and certainly not just to the UK.


A key reason why the debate seems to elude a common consensus is that the strengths of these particular programmes also tend to be their weaknesses. For example, one of the great strengths of the IB is that it maintains the breadth of subjects taken and does not allow pupils to ignore their weaker areas. However, this also means that there are subject combinations that are simply not available. For example, you cannot take all three sciences, and you can only take two if you are happy not to take an arts subject.


If you have a particular passion for the arts, the IB will not allow you to take more than one subject – for example,


THE BEST FIT FOR INTERNATIONAL PUPILS?


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