The Return of Exam Results Day
It’s one of those days we never really missed during the COVID years. To be fair, it never really went away. Even with the predicted grades there was still an element of finalising them by the SQA (and in some cases downgrading them) so that pupils did still have a degree of nervous waiting in August. But this year it is back in all it’s anxiety ridden glory — for pupils and, in a different way, for teachers too.
It would be foolish to think everything else was back to normal though. Pupils had to struggle with patchy attendance, in some cases a limited baseline from previous years of missed work due to pandemic learning (think skills gained in S3/4 being developed and tested in S5) and often periods of their regular teacher being absent too. On top of all of that remember this year’s Higher candidates were sitting an exam for the first time ever — with all the stress that goes along with that.
Headteacher Billy Burke wrote a good piece in TES this week on the notion that looking at headline attainment data, especially the number of Highers gained, is a mistake because pupils now have access to a broad range of courses such as National Progression Awards and other SCQF qualifications that don’t fit neatly into the nonsensical league table narrative. That’s true, and it’s important we look at the holistic achievements of pupils not just the grades printed on their certificates.
But, for most pupils, those grades really do matter — to them especially. Rightly or wrongly (and I’d argue wrongly, keep reading) these grades are something most of them agonise over.
No doubt on results day we will see the local authority press offices drag out the giant cut-out As and line up their top performing schools for a glossy jumping photo. We’ll see people pouring onto social media to share their #NoWrongPath stories. Neither of these is in itself a bad thing, and it is of course absolutely true that people can be happy, successful and achieve great things without following the path they imagine they would follow at 16.
However, I’ve always found the #NoWrongPath a bit off for young people on results day, albeit well intentioned. If they didn’t get the results they anticipated or wanted they are understandably devastated. No amount of telling them “it doesn’t really matter because I failed X and look at me now!” is going to help, and from pupils I’ve spoken to in the past they just find it a bit patronising.
Instead of reminding young people that exam results aren’t everything every time we give them their exam results, what we need to do is look at why we put them in this position in the first place. If all of these people who achieved greatness despite not doing as well as they hoped at secondary school really believed that, then why are they not clamouring to simply change the system that creates this anxiety in the first place?
Why do we continue to drive so much of senior phase learning towards a series of tests that capture a tiny fraction of the skills and knowledge they have gained in the preceding years?
Why do we continue to steer our curriculum towards a narrow focus on how to pass exams and how to gain skills to answer specific questions rather than skills that have a practical, real world application and are useful for the rest of their lives?
I’m not for a second dismissing the sentiment behind #NoWrongPath. It’s also totally right to say that the career you end up doing often bears no resemblance to the one you aimed for at high school. I became a teacher at 30 having done various random jobs up until that point and I don’t regret any of those career moves.
But maybe it’s time we put some booster rockets under those plans to rethink the role exams play in the educational journey. Otherwise we’ll rebrand the national agencies, appoint the same people to new roles, tinker around the edges of what our assessment system looks like and every year in August we’ll still have stressed out young people nervously waiting that brown envelope* or ping** with what they at least think will determine their future life chances.
Best of luck to them all tomorrow though. I’m proud of my lot who worked exceptionally hard in tough circumstances. They deserve only the best.
*Yeah I know hardly any of them will be waiting for the actual post
** Yeah I know nobody has their phone off silent these days
