A brave and honest step Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, will announce today that he intends to reduce the number of qualifications that can be counted towards school league tables from 3,175 to 125. This dramatic cut tells us as much about the distortion of our education system in recent years as it does about Mr Gove's commendable determination to rectify matters. He has had the guts to do what his predecessors never did, which is to expose the myth that all courses are of equal merit. This allowed schools to play the system by diverting children into easier subjects in order to boost rankings. This was bad for the children and, by extension, for Britain, because it has seen this country fall further down the league table that really matters - the international one. Under Mr Gove's plan, courses in subjects such as a diploma in horse care (worth four GCSEs), customer service, nail technology and practical office skills will no longer be listed as "equivalent" to GCSEs. This is not to say that vocational courses are lacking in merit; for some pupils they offer the skills that they will find useful in adulthood. But they are not the same as history or English literature or mathematics and we should not maintain the pretence that they are. As Professor Alison Wolf observed in her report last year - on which Mr Gove has based his decision - pretending that all qualifications are equally valuable devalues vocational education in people's eyes. There are signs that this is becoming more widely understood by young people. The rise in student fees has seen a fall in applications for next autumn's university intake, especially in courses that might be considered soft options. The reforms will take time to work through, but at least they are going in the direction of restoring academic rigour to our education system.