The announcement comes amid fears that exams are becoming too easy and failing to keep pace with those in other countries.

This summer almost three-in-10 A-levels were graded at least an A and the number of Cs awarded at GCSE increased for the 22nd year in a row.

Speaking on Monday, Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, said action would be taken to “restore confidence” to the examinations system.

This includes an overhaul of Ofqual, the watchdog established by Labour to vet standards in school and college tests.

It comes just weeks after the regulator admitted that this year’s GCSE science papers were too easy.

Mr Gove said: “Last month the exams regulator Ofqual acknowledged that the GCSE science exams were not set at a high enough standard. I’ve been saying this for years.

“But the previous Government chose to ignore my warnings and they defended a status quo that was in their interest but was actively damaging the education of hundreds of thousands of children a year.”

He said the creation of a “more assertive” qualifications regulator, with the power to order exam boards to toughen up their tests, was “critical to restoring confidence in our exams system”.

“We will l

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Problems with the papers date back to 2008, when the watchdog told examiners to create new versions of the course to be taught in 2011, with the current exams to be made more difficult in the intervening period.

Earlier this summer Ofqual rejected the 36 new science GCSEs drawn up by exam boards because the courses were still too easy.

The regulator believes questions should be made more difficult and that “disparities” in standards between Edexcel, AQA and OCR, England’s three exam boards, must be eliminated.

It said this year’s papers failed to address the existing problems with the qualification, but admitted there had been some progress since last summer, when questions included “Which of these is bigger than our galaxy – the Universe, the asteroids, the Moon or the Sun?”.

Last year students were also required to clarify whether tobacco is a legal drug, an illegal drug or a prescription drug, and whether beer is produced through the process of fermentation, desalination, ignition or combustion. <

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