A Conservative government would return to traditional A-levels and abandon league tables

The Conservatives today unveiled plans for a radical shake-up of A-levels that would see a return to traditional exams taken at the end of two years of study.

If elected, the party would move away from the "modular" system of assessing learning in bite-sized chunks and students sitting AS-levels after the first year in the sixth form.

They would also give universities the chance to demand that all prospective students sit an American-style universal admissions test.

A Tory administration would abandon league tables based on the current benchmark of how many pupils gain five A*-C grades at GCSE, including English and maths, which they say encourages teachers to focus on pupils at the C/D borderline, while neglecting both the lowest and highest performers.

Instead, they would take the number of young people who gained GCSEs in English and maths as their main measure of success.

The shadow education secretary, Michael Gove, outlined the plans as he published an independent review by Sir Richard Sykes into the future of qualifications and assessment.

It concluded that A-levels were failing to provide universities with a reliable means of comparing students, or to indicate how much they knew and understood about their subject.

Gove wants universities and academics to be responsible for deciding the content of A-levels. He said that while modular options would still be available, the move would be towards a more rigorous system where candidates studied for two years and sat all their exams at the end of that period.

"We have to look at whether we're equipping state school students with the best exams possible to compete fairly with their independent school counterparts," he said.

The Tories would also stop vocational qualifications such as BTecs being ranked as worth a certain number of GCSEs for the process of creating league tables, which they say leads to schools pushing pupils into such options inappropriately, purely to boost their ratings.

"We need to ensure children pursue qualifications because of their intrinsic value, not because they help schools to game the system," Gove said.

Sykes's review recommended that a Conservative government consult with universities to see if they wanted students to take a standardised university admissions test, similar to the American SAT, to be taken as well as A-levels. It would measure language, maths and reasoning skills.

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