If you have an 18-year-old in your life, as I do, or even if you vaguely know of one, please take a moment to think kindly of them and wish them well today.
Today is A level results day and for my son and his peers, taking their A Levels in May and June was their first ever attempt at sitting a formal exam. Can you imagine just how unprepared most of them must have felt?
In March 2020 they had the GCSE rug suddenly and unexpectedly whipped out from under their young feet, just as they were preparing to ramp up for the final push towards exams which never happened. I remember only too vividly the feeling of total freefall and bewilderment that descended following the government announcement that there would be no exams whatsoever for the foreseeable future.
I do wonder how much better he would have fared if schools had remained open, like in Sweden
My son then spent over five whole months – April to September – without any kind of schooling, instruction, focus or even certainty about whether he’d be able to return to sixth form in the autumn. Typically (or so I’m told) like a lot of boys approaching GCSEs, my son had only really just begun to properly apply himself to his studies just before Covid hit, assuming that he could put his foot to the floor and ‘pull it out of the bag’ at the last minute in the exam hall. So the idea that his grades would now be assessed on his previous, rather hit and miss academic efforts, was not at all comforting.
He did get a place at his school’s sixth form for his chosen subjects, but then schools closed again just before Christmas 2020, depriving his year of a further four months of structured learning before reopening in mid-March 2021.
The Children’s Commissioner wrote at around this time that: ‘the impact of missed education during Covid will affect some children sitting exams for years to come [and will] leave a chasm between those who barely missed a class and those who have been severely punished by Covid.’
We now know that during this turbulent time, only the fortunate and the wealthy received regular and adequate online lessons. A great number of state schooled children received the bare minimum during Covid and this cohort of teenagers has faced more disruption and uncertainty than almost any other group in history.
To put it into perspective, during the second world war, inner-city schools only closed during the blitz when there were insufficient numbers of children left after the evacuation programme began, and local rural schools then took up the slack.
Our current crop of exam-taking teenagers have had it pretty bad especially when you consider the previous two years of teacher-assessed exams where grades (especially in the private school sector) mysteriously increased to levels that were previously unthinkable, leading to accusations of grade fiddling.
Others, mostly in state schools, had their predicted grades unfairly downsized due to an algorithm – described by Boris Johnson as ‘mutant’ – which led to wide-scale protests and an eventual U-turn by the Department for Education and a return to the imperfect teacher assessments instead. What a fiasco for our kids.
These pupils will never really know how they would have performed under the usual pressure of exam-day stress and nerves and much as I’ve encouraged my son to just try and get on with it and ignore all the disruption, I do wonder how much better he would have fared if schools had remained open, like in Sweden for example, and his original GCSE exams had gone ahead.
At least his year group would have had an idea of how to prepare and what it feels like to revise like crazy and perform under pressure up against the clock. Somewhat essential, you would have thought, before tackling the gargantuan effort that is A Levels.
Sadly we’ll never know, but this morning when he opens that envelope surrounded by all his similarly unprepared friends, his immediate future will be determined by the previous two years of chaos and disruption and we will, once again, stoically cope with whatever is thrown at us and try and help him navigate whatever comes next.
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