Over the last year or so, rumours have been circulating that there is a list of ‘banned’ A-level subjects in universities – or at least in the Russell Group, which represents the top 20 universities. Earlier this year the Telegraph’s education correspondent claimed that ‘thousands of teenagers are effectively being shut out of prestigious institutions after taking subjects such as media studies, dance and psychology in the sixth form’ (Paton 2011). If you are a psychology A-level student, or the parent of one, you could be forgiven for asking yourself if you have made a mistake and limited your university options. As a teacher, you may be wondering if you have given your students sound advice to study psychology.
There is nothing new about fashionable subjects like psychology having to justify their existence to traditionalists. In the early 2000s, the general secretary of the Secondary Heads’ Association singled out psychology as an easy A-level. However, that argument was soon debunked as studies of the relative difficulty of different A-levels showed that when A-level subjects were ranked, psychology fell squarely in the middle alongside maths (Jarvis 2004).
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