The Education Panel with Justine Greening, Clare Marchant & Roger Taylor

The former head of exams regulator Ofqual, Roger Taylor, has told Times Radio there needs to be reform of the education system to better prepare students for working life.

Speaking ahead of next week's A-Level results he told Daisy McAndrew there is an "addiction to exams" but that employers are now looking at "their own mechanisms of assessment":

This addiction to exams is at its worst in the accountability regime and we want education to focus on giving students, young people, kids what they need to progress in life. If you look at what employers are doing now, and even the universities are starting to do this, they are turning to their own mechanisms of assessment. It's not that they don't like exams, they use loads of exams, they get kids to sit down and do tests. They want to know if they can read and write well. They do use tests but they use other things as well. And this is a real risk because if schools and universities aren't giving the people who are there to learn the evidence they need to get their jobs and get their opportunities in life, they're letting them down.

At the moment the whole education system is not geared enough around the question of what do you need to show somebody to both find the opportunities in life and to show that you've got the skills to pursue those opportunities. That for me is the crux of it and the thing that there's a huge amount we could do to improve.

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