What do you say to a child who is about to be given grades for exams she hasn’t even sat?
The Covid Cohort have had enough to contend with and now the Government is interfering with their A-level results. Don’t they care about our children’s mental wellbeing? As the year group who didn’t have the chance to do exams, surely it doesn’t matter whether they do a bit better than they might have done if everything was normal. But it isn’t. There has been nothing normal about the past four months.
So why does the Government think they know the potential of this set of students better than their own teachers? But then how can you trust a Government who doesn’t value poetry?
This is my third set of A-levels as a parent. The third and the most stressful. What do you say to a child who is about to be given grades for exams she hasn’t even sat? How do you calm a child when the news is relentlessly bleak? This isn’t a normal pre-results fear.
Yet the Government has decided it knows best. Even though - if last night's announcement about mock results being part of a 'triple lock', not to mention the furore in Scotland, is anything to go by - they may already be regretting the algorithm that has downgraded more than 40 per cent of the teacher recommended grades.
There is certainly nothing fair about bringing mocks into the results equation.
Pupils whose mocks were in December as opposed to March are at a ridiculous disadvantage. It’s laughable and unjust and certainly won’t offer any comfort to my daughter who sat mocks in January after spending two weeks in bed with flu over the Christmas holidays.
We told her to do the exams anyway as they didn’t matter. Retrospectively they do. If the Secretary of State for Education Gavin Williamson thinks he’s managed to avoid a backlash by this latest ill thought through intervention he’s underestimated schools, parents and most importantly pupils.
My daughter has already started apologising. She’s convinced her grades are going to be lowered and doesn’t want us to be disappointed in her. She’s worried about her class ranking. Who pits a group of stressed teenagers living under forced lockdown against each other? Exams were never about classroom league tables. What a great message to pass on to these anxious teenagers: that to succeed, someone else needs to fail. And fail some will - courtesy of a computer.
This year group, more than any other, deserve to do well. When teachers came up with their predicted grades in March they didn’t need to take into consideration the child who might misread a question for which she would be marked down, or the child who finds it difficult to concentrate when the pollen count is high or who is so panicked he’s not sleeping or who has been distracted during an exam by the sound of someone cracking their knuckles. The teachers imagined, and quite rightly, what their pupils should be able to attain in a perfect world.
But the world is far from perfect. This Covid Cohort of vulnerable, exhausted, anxious and stressed children have had to stay at home for months. There was no end of exam euphoria, no (in the case of my daughter) first legal drink in the pub, no parties on the beach or clubbing in Magaluf, none of the rites of passage experienced by her older siblings.
They’ve had no final assembly, no end of school balls or parties. Their wings were clipped when they were unceremoniously kept at home. On Thursday, many children will feel they might never fly.
My daughter has been fretting in her bedroom. She’s got her old books out of the cardboard box and shown me her ‘peng’ - beautiful - notes.
Notes she never got to use because the government lacked the imagination to find a way to allow our children a say in their own future. She wanted to sit her A-levels because it looked as though she was going to peak academically at the right time. She didn’t even get the chance to sit an open book exam like her university siblings.
If it doesn’t go her way then she can sit her A-levels in the Autumn but she hasn’t been in school since March. Both of her siblings resat one or more of their AS-levels (they were a good system by the way) and many of their contemporaries resat one or two papers to bump up their grades to get into university second time round.
This group will have to sit entire A-levels for which they haven’t prepared. If results had come out in June, those that needed to, could have spent the summer revising.
Let’s hope universities focus on why they made offers to students and not care about these made up results. Any university would be lucky to have my daughter and I’m immensely proud of her. I hope we will be celebrating on Thursday but there’s a real chance we may well be disappointed for her – I could never be disappointed in her.
Having survived this crisis, I hope this year group will grow up to think creatively and originally. I won’t be surprised if they stick two fingers up at a system that has failed to support them. I hope they will go on to create a society where creative thinking matters, where poetry is applauded and where governments trust the judgment of teachers.
Read more: A-level results day 2020 checklist: your guide to timings and the changes to expect this year
