August 25th 2023.
A part of me wonders whether we are selling young people a lie by pushing this narrative around worse-than-expected exam results. Every year, hugely successful people come forward to reveal how they failed their exams many years ago. The overriding message is that it doesn’t matter if young people fail their GCSEs or A Levels because life does not come to a halt with low grades.
This advice is no doubt important, but as a teacher I feel it could be selling an unfairly idealistic view of the world outside of school to kids who are going to be in for a rude awakening when they enter it. For example, Jeremy Clarkson’s smug annual post reminding everyone he got a C and 2 Us in his A-Levels. Or the tweet from the Chase’s Shaun Wallace revealing he failed his own exams many years ago.
It’s a point that it is more important than ever to make this year, as predicted, this cohort’s GCSE results have fallen for the second year in a row as schools and young people come to terms with the impact of the pandemic on learning. As a teacher, I will always support the message that failure is not just okay but is an important part of life – especially with children’s mental health on the decline and ever less support for young people through an NHS on its knees.
What I'm concerned about is that we are selling a very rose-tinted version of the world we live in today. Britain a few decades ago was a very different place to today. As economic conditions have worsened and as the gaping chasm between the rich and poor has grown ever larger, I’m not sure we can say with good conscience that young people today do have the same opportunities to find success outside of traditional educational realms as they once might have.
In an increasingly competitive job market, employers look for academic success because it’s considered the more reliable litmus test. Places at better-rated colleges, sixth forms and universities rely on exam results. The best-paid grad schemes take the highest achieving graduates. Behind so many of these impressive success stories is an unspoken cushion of privilege that is simply not there today for many young people.
Excellent exam results can often be a ladder to climb over the barriers in the way of their success, and so it can feel false to amplify those messages that the contents of that envelope doesn’t matter. Don’t get me wrong - the last thing I want young people to do is to consider their futures over if their GCSE results don’t contain 9s today. We need to celebrate the wins that don’t grab the headlines - the Cs and Ds from students who were expected not to turn up at all.
But we need to turn our attention towards how we can ensure young people today, whose academic journey may be curtailed by exam results, are still able to experience success – whatever that looks like. That might be improving the offer for apprenticeships that could be working to ensure that grade requirements better acknowledge the impacts of poverty; or it might be funnelling funding into schools to ensure that every single child – not just the academically elite – has access to the best quality education. Whatever the answer is, we need to focus on the future, not nostalgia for the past.
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