The best bet for that would seem to have been Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, although getting in was quite hard,
It was certainly complained about at the time: in order to get a degree, lack of which is a barrier to most interesting jobs, you have to pick one by age 17 (in order to go through the university application process on time). And to do that, you have to pick usually three “A” levels by age 15, which need to be at least in the right general direction. If you don’t really know what you want to do by age 15, the options are “don’t go to university” or “pick something you’re good at, get the degree, then talk yourself into a more interesting job later”.
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It might be that he ended up there, though by a roundabout way. There is even the possibility that this happened even without his Civil Service exam having been exceptional (though it might well have been very good).
In about 1975-1976, what kind of subjects were A-levels and what were the primary barriers to collecting a lot of them?
Was there just one ‘English’ or could you have ‘English Literature’ and ‘English Composition’? Was there a ‘French’ language A-level and, if so, did universities value it? I assume ‘History’ was among the A-levels you could take, but what were the other humanities? ‘Classics’? What else?
Was ‘Math’ a great catch-all or could you have ‘Applied Mathematics’ and ‘Pure Mathematics’ (or whatever name they gave the part more concerned with mathematical proofs and theory than working out an answer)? Were there ‘Economics’? What about ‘Chemistry’ and ‘Physics’? How many sciences or applied sciences?
This character, Jack Swain, did get all the A-levels he reasonably could at age fifteen, precisely because he didn’t know exactly what he wanted to do, but happened to be good at cramming for tests because he had discipline, stamina and was more motivated by the challenge of tests many others considered stressful than he ever was at ordinary coursework.
Then he joined the Royal Marine Commandos and managed to be picked as an officer candidate on a Short Service Commission. Swain enjoyed the training, he enjoyed the challenge of commanding men and the variety of life as a Royal Marine Commando. In his fourth year of service, Swain seriously considered attempting to have his SSC converted to a regular Commission and making a career in the Royal Marine Commandos.
In the Falklands, though, Jack Swain learned things about himself and about soldiering. The first was that when the time came, he performed as he was trained, without thinking. The moral enormity of taking a life was reduced to a simple mechanical task, one which affected him not at all. Jack thought about his father, the understated certainty of his faith, and wished that his faith was as sure. Wished that he felt sorrow for the death he caused, and was comforted by the certainty of forgiveness as he repented. But he felt no sin and no sorrow. He wondered when he had lost his faith and if his humanity was gone with it. Did that mean that being a soldier was his only option, now?
Jack Swain also learned that losing some of his men in combat was worse than the grief of losing a friend. Much worse. It was an ocean of guilt he could drown in. Grieving widows, their uncomprehending young children, a mother crying for her child and the father, stoic, trying to act the proud father to the fallen hero, but burying his heart with his son. All of them, scarred with the shards of broken dreams, because Jack had failed. They were his men. He led them into battle and he was meant to bring them home. Instead he brought their remains and inadequate words.
The price of failure was too high for Jack. When the term of his Short Service Commission ran out, he left the Royal Marine Commandos. Outwardly, he was his old gregarious and adventurous self. He talked about seeing more of Europe than a few ports. Visiting Africa and Asia. His mother suggested that he dust off some old short stories he wrote and see if he’d make a writer. He humored her, but when he tried to write something he meant, he found himself alone with his thoughts.
Jack still has unresolved issues related to his guilt and grief, but he’s trying to move on and fill his life with something interesting so he doesn’t have to spend too much time with himself. In a different world, Jack might become a war correspondent and never pursue a university degree at all. But then he would not be where our Jack is at the start of play, so, for some reason, he picks a university degree that he thinks could lead to an interesting life, full of travel, adventure and even risk, as long as it is merely risk to him.
I’ll try to figure out what A-levels he might have based on his IQ, Will and Talents, but need a bit more information on how they worked and what his choices might be in his mid-20s based on what optional exams he took when he was sixteen.
Yes. My sister did. Didn’t even have A levels at the time. But there was more than one entrance exam, depending on the grade of role you were going to.
Ealing would have been giving degrees under the auspices of the CNAA and the degrees would have said that on the certificate, rather than Ealing College. And that wasn’t a formality - the CNAA audited courses at non-university colleges and polytechnics, and had input into curriculums at times because they were working very hard to maintain parity between CNAA degrees and university degrees.
To get onto the fast stream / administrative trainee scheme for the FCO in the late 80s, they’d have taken CNAA degrees, but they’d have likely required a 2:1 or a First in an honours degree. Not all degrees had that at the time. And the earlier in the decade you go, the more likely it is that your NPC would be laughed out of any application to the FCO if they didn’t have an Oxbridge degree. (Maybe SOAS and LSE would have been okay depending on speciality. But definitely not an HE College.)
To clarify: you chose the A-levels you’d do at age 15, then sat the exams at 17. (There was a very slow shift away from exams and into evaluation of coursework, but I don’t think that’s really got started by the time you’re looking at.) Generally the courses were intensive enough that you wouldn’t have time to do more than 3 (for most people taking them) or 4 (with specific subjects, e.g. Maths and Further Maths were often taught as a single course for people who could keep up), and nor would a school be able to fit that many lessons into your or its timetable.
Which specific subject papers are available depends on the examination board, of which there were several. In general by the 1980s. “Oxford & Cambridge” and “London” were considered the reasonably hard ones, “Oxford” and “Cambridge” alone rather easier, though with what truth I do not know. Generally each school would offer papers from only one board, though if there were esoteric subjects that their preferred board didn’t offer they’d use a different one for that.
Broadly I would expect to see “English Language” and “English Literature”, just “[language]” for any other language though it would include at least the need to write sensibly about one of the set books for that year as well as the basic grammar and vocabulary skills. (I don’t know whether A level foreign languages also needed a live oral examination, but I would expect so; O level, taken two years earlier, did.)
The “Maths” (always with the s in British English though not usually treated as a plural) that I did was “Maths” and “Further Maths”, as I mentioned; I believe another board may have split the hard version into “Pure” and “Applied” papers instead. (That’s by subject matter, not by teaching emphasis. Calculus and set theory would be in Pure, probability and mechanics in Applied.) Sciences are Physics, Chemistry, Biology. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an Economics paper. There was certainly Law.
How much a university will value a given A level depends entirely on the course you’re applying for. Generally they will expect all three A levels to be relevant to the course. If you have two relevant and one unexpected, they’ll ask you why you did that when you interview. They notice the A level syllabi getting smaller and easier year after year, and they’re irked with having to bring new students up to the level of knowledge that they’d have had on day one a decade ago.
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1980s subjects included History, English Lang and English Lit, and I believe both Geography and Geology. I don’t know when Religious Studies came in as an A-level (and it might have been Divinity or Theology). This link notes Economics, Horticultural Science, Engineering Drawing, Technical Drawing, and Commercial Subjects, too. On that basis, I wouldn’t be surprised to see an Agricultural Science and perhaps an Animal Husbandry paper somewhere. Some kind of A-level in maritime stuff has existed at various times, relevant to folks looking for a naval or merchant naval job, but I don’t know about the 1980s.
As someone who went through it in the 1990s-2000s, the process hasn’t changed much. You focus much too early and do too narrow a range of subjects. Apart from anything else, this will probably make it difficult for your PC to do extra modules or A-levels, because he simply won’t have done the prerequisites. For anything beyond core subjects, if he didn’t pick them as optional O-levels, he might only have encountered the topic at all by chance in his personal reading.
Fundamentally, you want to know at age 11 what degree you might want to do, so you can focus on doing well enough in the right subjects to be allowed to take them at GCSE/O-level, in order to take them at A-level. My dad was kicked off several subjects, but was strong enough in science to get an Engineering degree.
I don’t recall my timetable, but I’d say 6-8 hours per subject out of a 30-hour school week, with some time lost to compulsory sport (a full afternoon each week for us), assemblies, and taking registers. We had a few hours of silent study between lessons, simply due to timetabling, which was used for homework.
There was some wiggle room for extra. My school had us all take A-level General Studies with only 2 hours of teaching per week. I knew one boy who took French as an extra A-level, because his parents were French teachers and he got permission to simply sit it via the school, without attending their lessons. A few of us “high-fliers” were forc-, er, permitted to take an extra subject chosen by the school (usually something simpler than an A-level) via lunchtime classes!
Degree courses were still very rigid in general; many had things like: “2nd year: These five compulsory modules, plus either Biochemistry for Biologists or Statistics for Biologists”. A few Combined X courses had appeared, notably Natural Sciences; I remember even at Cambridge you could mix and match various combinations from the relevant departments. This normally required even better grades than you’d need to take the single-subject degree, on the grounds that it demanded more of the student.
I got very lucky: my own university did have some combined honours courses, and my Biology degree was one of the few that didn’t fill up the entire timetable with compulsory modules, so I did get to pick some interesting things, and when I realised I needed to completely change subject, I was able to slide into a Natural Sciences degree and cobble together a Frankensteinian horror that somehow made up a complete timetable.
But!
What you really want to be looking at is the Open University. Not sure if you’re familiar, but it’s a distance learning university (established in the 1960s) offering largely self-guided courses. You can do individual modules in whatever you want, and many people just do that. You can also build them up into a year of a degree course, and eventually either transfer to a standard university, or build up three years’ worth and get the degree. This is a great choice for someone who either doesn’t go to a typical university, or graduates and wants to expand his learning beyond that. He could go off after school, get a job anywhere in the world, study by correspondence course alongside that, and then choose a subset of the modules he’s taken and go to finish the degree at a “proper” university. The BBC used to broadcast lectures and classes for OU students which I’d sometimes catch as a kid at weird hours of day or night.
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Based on Talents, Swain would likely do best with Geography, Economics and English Literature. The university degree which makes the most sense with that is probably Bsc in Geography with Economics, which was actually pioneered by Ealing College of Higher Education, with the degree formally granted by CNAA, but by the 1980s, also offered by the University of Reading and later becoming a popular LSE degree.
Giving LSE their proper dues, they did teach ‘Commercial Geography’, a very similar interdisciplinary concept, just before the end of the 19th century, and worked with King’s College London to offer some geography alongside their Economics degrees. Ealing originated the modern format of the degree, not the concept of considering commercial interests alongside the study of Geography.
The focus of a BSc in Geography with Economics is on ‘human geography’, which in GURPS translates to Geography (Political), some Current Affairs and maybe a point in Sociology, along with, of course, Economics. It’s relatively common in international business circles and a pretty good preparation for working for the Foreign Office.
I rolled the dice and Swain would have succeeded with significant margins at skill checks against Economics, Geography (Political) and Literature, even if there were a +0 TDM, i.e. a skill check which working professionals in the field find challenging (very Talented for specific things). As I expect taking an exam which you have had months to study for and know fairly precisely what aspects of skills are being tested, I expect a +4 TDM to the default levels of the children or so.
Which would translate a Critical Success on Economics and thus a near perfect Economics exam result, Geography results good enough for an A and whatever grade an English Literature examiner would give a professional book critic who took the English Literature exam for some reason. Swain is also good at English in general, not just Literature, but there his work would be good only if judged against other teenagers, not quite working professional level.
That probably means a BSc in Geography with Economics from the University of Reading. Which is sad, because I wanted to demonstrate that the educational institutions which had become de facto universities well before they came to be called Polytechnics in 1988, and mostly all adopted ‘University’ after 1992, actually educated their share of intelligence and security officers in the 1980s.
Both MI5 and SIS had started to recruit more diverse candidates in the 1980s. Yes, they were still sometimes talent spotted by trusted friends of the services, at Cambridge and Oxford, but MI5 also tried to poach gifted constables with whom they worked cases and both services heard about unconventional candidates through various methods. They had military connections as well as academic.
Someone who had already been positively vetted, with the leadership skills and motivation to become an officer of the Royal Marine Commandos and was noted as unusually empathetic, caring and trustworthy by all who evaluated him, is someone who ticks a lot of boxes for SIS. They don’t care about Commando skills, but they value the ability to solve complex problems while tired and stressed, and while handling an agent is not the same as leading men, both are tasks which rely mostly on emotional intelligence and the ability to get people to trust you.
By the 1980s, Oxbridge graduates are far from the only new recruits and while social class might affect the chances someone had of rising to the most senior ranks, this was also a time where the SIS had to fight against negative stereotypes held by Labour politicians of them and their work. That’s why women were again allowed to work as agent-handlers in the 1970s and that’s why the SIS went to considerable pains to signal that they wanted the best candidates, not just the right public school ties and an Oxbridge degree in something impressively useless.
In a sample of six former SIS officers, at least some of them should not be people who prepared for their role by taking the most rational route to ending up there. At least one should be less traditional, having not necessarily ever made decisions calculated to find themselves as an intelligence officer, but more fell into it, and, statistically, the ones recruited during the 1960s and 1970s were much less likely to be non-Oxbridge graduates.
Rough demographics indicate there should be 2+ Oxbridge graduates, 1+ from the various institutions which today make up the University of London, 1+ from the other Russel Group or equivalent universities and maybe one from all other ways to earn a degree in the UK.
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Oh yeah. Not relevant to Icelander’s stuff but I credit that with keeping me aware of maths as a fun thing when school maths was taught by teachers who clearly didn’t find it fun because they were only keeping a lesson or two ahead of the class.
After considerable thought, it makes sense to me that as a mature student and someone dealing with grief, trauma and survivor’s guilt, Jack Swain would not smoothly transition into finding the most prestigious university which he could have attended based on his A-levels and immediately hit upon the most suitable degree for the job he eventually ends up in. No, he had decided he was going to help manage a hotel in Bermuda, which is why he attended the Ealing College of Higher Education (which became a Polytechnic shortly after he graduated) for a Hospitality Management BA degree.
After someone discreetly suggested that maybe he could do more interesting work after he graduated, Swain might well have used the Open University to study for the exam he needed for the Diplomatic Service. He was already good at ‘human geography’, his Economics A-level was exemplary and his English skills were good, aside from him having some French and being good with languages.
As things turned out, he was never appointed to a diplomatic post, but not because his test scores were not good enough for it. The SIS simply decided that he was best used with ‘natural cover’, i.e. as someone with a degree in Hospitality Management looking for a place to open a hotel, working with partners who would come up with most of the money.
If he’d been with the SIS longer, he would probably have been posted somewhere with diplomatic cover, eventually, but as things turned out, he’d barely started working for them when the Director of Administration and Personnel had to make deep cuts, and he suggested Swain to Mrs. Kocourek when she asked if he had any exceptional officers with certain skills who were likely to become casualties of the cuts and were thus interested in an offer to work for a private consulting company for far more than they made before.
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In case it is of interest, in Scotland in the early 80s…
You did O grades in your 4th year (aged 15-16). Typically 8 of them. Arithmetic was a separate O Grade to Maths.
Then Higher Grades in your 5th year (aged 16-17). A Higher is a smidgen less than an A level. Higher English covered both Language and Literature.
Then in 6th Year (aged 17-18) you did up to 4 Sixth Year Studies (SYS) (more than an A level), with some extra or repeated Highers and/or O Grades to fill out your timetable if you were doing 3 or less SYS. SYS Maths had five different courses, so you could in theory do nothing but Maths and get 4 SYS qualifications in it. At our school you partially made your own timetable, and were trusted to be getting on with stuff during periods when the teacher wasn’t around.
For going to a Scottish University, they understood the Higher/SYS system and partway through your 6th year many people got an unconditional offer of a place based on the Highers they’d already got. A conditional place also took the existing Highers into account and would probably only be something like “Get a B in SYS Chemistry”.
English Universities were clueless about Highers/SYS and rarely gave unconditional offers. They also asked for stupidly difficult things to achieve, like getting an A in three SYS courses. (They marked them much harder than they marked Highers, possibly because they contained a lot of project work?)
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It is. I have a Scot, a Dr. Robert Ferguson, who is not a former SIS man, but came to the Defence Intelligence Staff through the Royal Navy. Well, he served a five year Short Service Commission in the Royal Navy before attending the University of Edinburgh, where I’ve marked him having taken a Joint MA Honours Degree in Economics and Geography in 1970, which I hope is, a) Something they taught back then, and b) That this gives him enough of a grounding in physical geography for Cambridge, in association with the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI), to have accepted him as a PhD candidate in Physical Oceanography.
After getting his PhD, he was hired by the Royal Navy as an expert in all-source intelligence analysis of Soviet activity and strategic interest in Arctic Ocean, as well as nearby marginal oceans from the Chuchi Sea through the Barents, Greenland and the North Sea, as well as the North Atlantic. IMINT, MASINT and SIGINT were the primary sources of intelligence for him to analyze, with sonar data from SOSUS critical in analyzing submarine traffic and IMINT from aerial photography and American reconnaissance satellites provided under UKUSA and Five Eyes, as well as OSINT and scientific/technical data from The Technical Cooperation Program (TTCP).
Once the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI) at Cambridge started to offer an MPhil in Polar Studies in 1980, the Navy granted Dr. Ferguson a bursary to attend it, as both a student and a visiting lecturer on icebreaker activity and the potential Arctic route for submarines and even, with enough nuclear icebreakers, for surface ships, which was believed to motivate Soviet activity in the region.
Before attending the University of Edinburgh, he would have gone through the Scottish education system, taking O grades, Higher Grades and SYS. His qualifications would have been fairly heavy in practical Maths and physical sciences, with a secondary theme in prerequisites for economics, which I expect might have meant some social science and probably pushed his course load near the limit, though he did have some hobbies, including the Mastermind TV show, sailing and playing woodwind instruments, starting with the recorder and progressing to the pipes.
When he appears in play, he’ll be middle-aged and out of shape, but there was a time when he was an athlete, rowing for the EUBC. That time was twenty years before the start of play, of course, and any residual muscles are concealed beneath a layer of fat and a faint resemblance to a walrus. Unfortunately for anyone who does not enjoy bagpipe music, he’s still got the lungs to play at full volume, entirely too long and enthusiastically.
When I did my law degree in the mid 90s, you did 120 credits a year. The standard would be to take 120 credits worth of law modules but you COULD take up (I think) 30 credits in other courses. I did one in Welsh History for example. This is obviously Wales and might be slightly different (although I suspect not that different) to English unis?
I don’t know who switched to credits or when; you’d probably have to check individual universities. It’s still fairly unusual in England, I suspect more common in the newer universities that aren’t as bound by tradition.
Aberystwyth pretty old - for all but the really old ones anyway! Although it is quite modern in its outlook.
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Scottish Universities in the 80s also did degrees slightly differently to English ones.
A Scottish degree was 4 years long, not 3. Each year was worth 4 points (so in first year you took 4 courses each worth 1 point).
If you passed everything, then by the end of year 3 you’d have 12 points. At that point, if you’d decided that university was not for you, and you had at least 10 points worth of passed courses, you could leave with an Ordinary Degree.
Or you could stay on for a 4th year (“be invited to stay”) and do another 4 points worth (total 16) to get an Honours Degree (e.g. BSc).
Medicine students did 5 years at University.
The British Antarctic Survey was based in Cambridge in the 1980s.
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I did my Masters recently at Bournemouth and all the Units were expressed with a credit value - each unit was worth 20 credits and the thesis was worth 60. I needed to amass 180 credits to be awarded the degree.
But unlike the US system, credits couldn’t be transferred in from other fields of study. I had 3 mandatory units, 3 elective units (from a total of 6, all delivered through the cybersecurity school) and the thesis had to be approved and marked from within the school.
So I’m not sure what value the credits added.
That’s a cunning way of avoiding the nasty weather.
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The climate in Oxford is not that different!
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Yes, universities I’ve dealt with all had credits, but not in the US sense.
One purpose is administrative: all undergraduates are on (say) 120 credits per year and need to pass 100 credits to progress, then the bachelor’s requires 200 credits of which 100 must be in third-year modules. This makes it easier to write regulations. You might leave early with just a Certificate, or a Diploma, instead of a full degree, based on how many credits you earned so far.
And the credits partly represent how much time something takes, either in classroom or lab time, or independent study. So in theory you’re ensuring students do similar amounts of work, whether they’re taking Omni-Statistics for Theologians (60 creds) or six modules about individual works of obscure poet G M Wrensthorpe (10 credits each).
It’s also used for the fairly arbitrary “workload allocation” - an academic might be required to teach 60 credits of modules per year as part of their funding, or those 60 credits might give them leeway to demand a certain amount of research time, or get out of being Deputy Head of Disciplinary Action, or something.
There’s also some portability between institutions if they decide the modules are similar enough to what you did elsewhere.
(I will stop now, but I can talk about this at fair length if wanted as this was part of my las-, er no, the one bef- er, four jobs ago, actually)
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Thank you for that explanation - that all makes perfect sense. No further questions, yer 'onner.