A committee of MPs who were investigating the fiasco say the answers they received from the government were "inadequate" and "perfunctory".

They are warning there could be another A-level disaster if the lessons of last year have not been learned.

The fiasco centred on complaints about the grading of last year's exams and contributed to the resignation of Estelle Morris as education secretary.

Now, the Commons education select committee - which carried out its own investigation into what went wrong - has rejected the government's responses to its report.

Very worried

Committee chairman, the Labour MP Barry Sheerman said: "We have sent the responses back because they were inadequate.

"If lessons have not been learned we would be very worried.

"We expect a certain standard of reply for an investigation into events which led to a secretary of state's resignation."

Mr Sheerman said the Department for Education and Skills had failed to answer questions about changes to A-levels being rushed in.

Barry Sheerman: Letter to Charles Clarke

Instead, he said, officials had tried to put the blame on the exam watchdog the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) or the exam boards themselves.

The committee has sent a letter to Education Secretary Charles Clarke, asking the government to reconsider its responses and warning that it is "not confident" lessons have been learned.

In its report, the committee said the division of A-levels into AS and more advanced A2 sections in 2000 had not been "properly thought through".

Although the AS-levels were piloted, the A2 was not.

This placed "considerable pressure" on teachers, students and the system in general.

The government said on Friday that lessons had been learned and would be acted on.

A spokeswoman said: "We have a working group on long-term reform, chaired by Mike Tomlinson, which is very aware of previous problems.

"We can give a cast-iron assurance that if we introduced reform at a later stage, it would be fully developed and fully tested."

Mr Sheerman commented: "Why didn't they say that to us?"

Re-grading

Earlier this year the head of the QCA, Ken Boston, warned that if the A-levels worked well this year it would be "by luck" and by a "hair's breadth".

The A-level crisis centred on complaints from some schools that bright students had been marked down in the second part of their A-levels, now known as A2s.

Eventually, the grades of 100,000 students were re-examined and 1,220 students saw their final A-level grades raised.

The inquiry by Mike Tomlinson into what happened concluded that the government had brought in the new style A-levels too quickly and had not piloted the A2 exams.