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Are we testing our children too much?

With the prospect of exams being cancelled comes, ironically, more and more testing – as schools scrabble to find ways of providing evidence for Teacher Assessed Grades - Tim Macpherson / Getty
With the prospect of exams being cancelled comes, ironically, more and more testing – as schools scrabble to find ways of providing evidence for Teacher Assessed Grades - Tim Macpherson / Getty

Another day, another agonising hint of uncertainty around our children’s exams this summer. The National Association of Head Teachers has asked the watchdog, Ofqual, for greater leniency in their marking to take into account disruption and absence caused by omicron. Ofqual is due to issue guidance around any changes to this year’s GSCE, A-levels and BTECs on February 7.

Just as in Christmas 2020, I never dreamed I’d be worrying about the Covid-safety of the following Christmas, I can’t now understand how, two years since the start of the pandemic, there might still be question marks hanging over this summer’s exams. If my son doesn’t do his A-levels this year, he and his cohort will never have sat an externally assessed exam, nor ever know what their results mean.

These announcements come with the best of intentions, but just introduce more uncertainty. And with the prospect of exams being cancelled comes, ironically, more and more testing – as schools scrabble to find ways of providing evidence for Teacher Assessed Grades (TAGs).

A parent of a girl at a state school that regularly tops the tables tells me that instead of just the usual set of mocks straight after Christmas, A-level students will this year do an extra set of exams in April, as “the school says they need more data points, in case they’re cancelled”. Her daughter felt none of the relief of having finished one set of exams; instead, she spent the whole of Thursday night having another crippling panic attack, her now default response to testing.

Laura Connors, a lawyer, was unlucky enough to have both a daughter and a son whose formal exams were cancelled last year and feels that the whole process was far more gruelling than usual. “The emphasis instead was on continuous testing,” she says. “The idea that these kids didn’t have public exams is technically true, but the idea that they weren’t tested isn’t. There’s a drip, drip, drip of exams the whole time.”

Young people, with their heightened sense of injustice, railed against the perceived inequity of cancelled exams. “My daughter was always saying: ‘It feels so unfair that people say we’re lucky that we didn’t have exams when I feel I’ve been tested a lot.’ ” On top of that, “when they got their results, it was all a bit muted because of all the talk of grade inflation”.

In August, then Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said: 'We are planning to move back to exams as part of assessment but always have to have contingency plans... we will be doing another extensive consultation about contingencies which will largely be based on teacher assessed grades.' - ROBERT BODMAN/AFP via Getty Images
In August, then Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said: 'We are planning to move back to exams as part of assessment but always have to have contingency plans... we will be doing another extensive consultation about contingencies which will largely be based on teacher assessed grades.' - ROBERT BODMAN/AFP via Getty Images

Psychologists have spoken of how the pandemic has raised our cortisol levels, the hormone response to danger, without ever allowing us to find a way of neutralising the danger to bring the levels back down again. This is particularly true of our ever-hormonal teenagers, who have had the adrenaline-fuelled intensity of frenzied revision and writing replaced with a relentless series of just-in-case assessments. Last year, one high-achieving independent school in London made pupils take three versions, in exam conditions, of every single GSCE paper that they’d have done in normal times.

Niki Gibbs worked as a secondary school counsellor in Bristol throughout the pandemic and is a member of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. She is co-chair of their school counselling expert reference group which is campaigning to put a paid counsellor into every school in the UK. She saw first-hand how the chaos affected school communities. “You need exams to get a job, get into college or get an apprenticeship. [Schools] weren’t reassured enough that there was an alternative set up and they wouldn’t be disadvantaged. It had a marked effect on the mental health of both teachers and young people.”

The nebulous nature of TAGs, the replacement for exams, felt akin to cancelling the Olympics only to be told that every daily jog or park run might contribute to whether or not you get a medal, she says. “The teachers kept saying ‘Just do your best’, but the pupils felt the pressure everywhere – in homework, everything they said in class, every test. That’s a lot of scrutiny.”

Last year was bad, but at least pupils had some understanding of how they would be graded. The year before, exams were cancelled with no warning in March 2020. My son William’s GSCE grades were instead based on some mocks that he’d done with no expectation that they’d turn out to be the real deal, as well as Year 10 exams that he’d done just after his 15th birthday. This was in contrast to Germany, Austria and Hungary, where school leavers’ exams were taken as normal – after all, social distancing has always been standard in an exam hall. Even in Italy, the earliest country to be hit by Covid in Europe, oral tests were carried out, while in Spain, the exams had a reduced number of questions.

When William heard that his GSCEs were to be cancelled, he was delighted, but elation was soon replaced with a sense of hollowness. Gibbs saw this with the pupils she counsels: “At first, they all thought ‘Wahey! No exams…’, but that didn’t last long, because it was replaced by a fear of the unknown.”

Niki Gibbs
Niki Gibbs

My son’s results were fine, but underscored by a sense that they were meaningless and arbitrary. Another friend’s son was less fortunate. A very bright, laid-back boy, his mocks were a disaster but, reasoned his parents, just the kick he needed to knuckle down. Instead, he was given dire grades that left him ineligible to stay on to sixth form. Despite acing the exams he opted to take for real in November of that year, he was too late to be able to do A-levels in the school he’d attended since he was 11.

Another girl I know chose to take her chemistry A-level in the November, in order to improve the grade she had been given in the summer, only to have the second paper cancelled due to the invigilator having Covid and, with that, her chances of getting into her dream university.

It wasn’t just exams that were cancelled, it was everything that goes with them. “It was really sad – there were no parties, proms and celebrations. My son didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye to his friends,” says Connors.

Such rites of passage, according to Gibbs, are formative. “You go through these experiences together, you bond, you think about who your tribe is… we’ve lost all that.”

Schools, pupils and parents are craving clarity. Zoë Brass, pastoral deputy head at South Hampstead High School in London, says that she’s noticed a marked improvement in the mood of this year’s GSCE and A-level students compared to last year’s. The usual meltdowns and collective panic have been replaced by a sense of purpose and a relief that comes with the hope that exams will be as “normal”.

Most of us still have nightmares about exams decades on – arriving at the hall filled with ranks of desks and a loudly ticking clock, having done no revision. But it turns out that the alternatives may be even worse.

Throughout the pandemic, children have shown extraordinary selflessness and resilience in the face of a disease that is rarely a threat to their own physical well-being. But for the sake of their minds, please let the next announcement that they hear be “you may now turn over your papers”.