Results days bring with them success and failure, joy and disappointment. At my A level-heavy school, the overwhelming majority of our students still eschew online checks and come in to pick up those paper statements. Within the first hour, those who have achieved what they needed are on their way, celebrating.
Those left behind are dismayed, disappointed, uncertain. They’ve missed the required grades and are unplaced. Euphoria evaporates: a gloom descends on me while I watch my fantastic colleagues provide advice and support as students are obliged to recalibrate and perhaps change life-plans.
We live with all that. But this year another element dismayed me: and it wasn’t to do with the candidates. Via Twitter, two school heads, one high-profile, the other anonymous, wrote heartfelt and disturbing pieces about the pressure of GCSE results.
We all feel our responsibility for our students’ results keenly. When things go well we rejoice: we share pain, too. But these two heads – undoubtedly speaking for many – discuss the pressure that the system, government above all, places on them.
The Guardian featured a “secret headteacher” writing after Thursday’s GCSE results, will I still have a job? The writer admitted to having no idea what his/her students would get in their GCSEs. Not because the school was sloppy, on the contrary: “There simply is nothing more my staff could have done.”
He/she blamed “changes to grade boundaries made at whim, structural changes to questions and papers, and some frankly ridiculous questions this year”. Moreover: “There are serious concerns about the quality of markers.”
He/she continued: “One of my good friends was sacked from his position of headteacher in a large academy chain after only two years ... the gap (between his estimates and the actual results) suggested to his bosses that he didn’t know what he was doing. He has three children, is brilliant and hasn’t secured a permanent job since.”
Highbury Grove School’s Tom Sherrington (@headguruteacher) wrote a blog just before GCSE results. In what he describes as “this age of hyper-accountability”, he points out that results “assume meaning far beyond the limits of their validity and reliability as measures of our students’ experience”.
This year his school’s results will be “at the lower end of the range I’d expected”. Again the goalposts have been moved, boundaries shifted, uncertainty created throughout the system. And now there are those misguided compulsory English and maths resits.
When, last May, complaints spread about the anxiety SATs create in primary children, hawkish commentators blamed schools which, they insisted, should absorb pressure, not communicate it.
It can’t. Headteachers soak up all they can, but pressure nonetheless leaks inexorably down through their senior teams into “ordinary” teachers, and affects children too. The wrong lies not in schools, but in the way they’re driven from above. A mad blindness possesses government and the academy chains it drives alike.
Wilfully, pig-headedly, they insist on confusing pupils’ individual exam achievements with statistics they believe they can employ as measures – and as sticks to beat schools. Grades cannot perform both functions.
Professionals deserve better leadership. The nation’s children a deserve better deal all round. Dare we hope that new education secretary, Justine Greening, might add a degree of sanity and humanity to the system? If she doesn’t, unrelenting pressure will cause school improvement to stall, and the profession will continue to haemorrhage teachers and school leaders who can’t take any more.
- Dr Bernard Trafford is head of Newcastle’s Royal Grammar School and a former chairman of HMC. His views are personal. Follow him @bernardtrafford