Today, many of my students are finishing their Latin exams. For some, the battle continues until just after half term.
Every year I have a range of clients, from those who quite enjoy the challenge of examinations all the way up to those for whom the fear is utterly crippling. Whichever way we look at the data, it does seem undeniable that anxiety among adolescents has risen sharply over the past decade across the developed world. Certainly in the 21 years that I spent in the classroom I witnessed an unquestionable spike in children presenting with anxiety; by the time I left, it was not unusual to walk down a corridor and find a child hovering outside almost every single classroom, all refusing to enter due to what they said was a fear of what would happen inside. Many parents are watching their capable, intelligent children unravel under the pressure of perfectionism, comparison and relentless digital scrutiny. In that environment, emotional resilience has become more than a fashionable phrase. Increasingly, it is an essential survival skill.
Recent research suggests that exam anxiety is now embedded in a wider crisis affecting adolescents. A 2025 study published in BMC Psychology described test anxiety as a “common form of situational anxiety” capable of seriously affecting both academic performance and mental health. The researchers found strong correlations between anxiety levels and a lack of emotional regulation in adolescents. At the same time, researchers are warning that the digital world surrounding teenagers may be amplifying these pressures. A systematic review published in the Journal of Adolescent Health in 2025 examined evidence that connected adolescent social media use and anxiety, concluding that significant associations exist between the two, even if the relationship is nuanced rather than universally causal. Heavy or compulsive use of social media appears to be closely associated with poorer mental wellbeing, disrupted sleep, diminished concentration and heightened emotional distress. A 2025 study in Computers in Human Behavior found that adolescents engaging in more than two hours of weekday screen time showed significantly greater mental-health risks, while passive scrolling in particular was linked to higher anxiety. For pupils sitting exams, those pressures can become combustible.
The old anxieties of adolescence were at least partly escapable. School ended in the mid-afternoon. Peer judgment, so essential to teenage development, did not continue relentlessly through the evening in the form of Snapchat conversations, TikTok videos or Instagram stories displaying apparently perfect (and often misguided) revision routines. Today’s students inhabit an always-on culture, in which achievement itself has become performative. Some teenagers are filming themselves revising under aesthetically pleasing lighting with motivational music and uploading it for public consumption. This is hugely concerning: young people are not merely under pressure to succeed, they are under pressure to appear successful. This phenomenon creates a loop of continuous social comparison, the feeling that one’s worth is measured constantly against curated versions of other people’s lives. During exam season, that comparison intensifies. Small wonder, then, that resilience is becoming central to our discussions about exam success.
Resilience is frequently misunderstood. It is not emotional coldness. It is not “toughening up”. Nor does it mean suppressing fear. Emotional resilience is the capacity to experience stress, disappointment and uncertainty without collapsing under them: it involves recovery rather than invulnerability. Most especially during GCSEs, when students are expected to sit multiple examinations in multiple subjects, it is inevitable that some of those examinations will go better than others. Resilience is essential, if students are to progress successfully through this testing marathon.
Many high-achieving pupils appear outwardly successful while inwardly fragile. Teachers increasingly describe students who attain excellent grades yet struggle to cope with setbacks that previous generations might have regarded as routine: a poor mock result, criticism from a teacher, rejection from a university course. Part of the problem lies in how success is framed. Young people absorb adult anxieties with remarkable efficiency. Politicians describe education as an economic battlefield, schools have to compete in league tables and universities are necessarily selective. Employers want experience and proof of concept.
The message heard by many teenagers is stark: fail now, fail forever. In reality, life trajectories are rarely so linear. Careers zigzag and ambitions evolve, so setbacks often prove formative rather than fatal. Certainly, I look back upon most of my failures with a sense that they came good in the end. Adolescents, lacking the long perspective of adulthood, experience examinations with an immediacy that can feel existential. Failure is something to be feared, not endured.
Resilience cannot simply be taught through assembly slogans or laminated posters reminding pupils to “believe in themselves”. (Dear Lord, I wish everyone would learn to accept this). Resilience must be cultivated. While schools, of course, have an important role to play here, they have nothing compared to the power of family.
If I could give one piece of advice to anyone who is worried about their children’s resilience, it would be to normalise struggle and discomfort. It’s important to let children see our failures as well as our successes: let them observe the struggle and the setbacks, let them see you come through them. Adolescents (and indeed anyone who suffers with anxiety in the longterm) often assume that everyone else is coping better than they are. High-performing families and indeed school cultures can unintentionally reinforce this illusion by celebrating outcomes while concealing vulnerabilities. But when students hear successful people speak honestly about setbacks and uncertainty, anxious feelings can become less dominating. Resilience develops when young people understand that disappointment can and must be endured. It’s a normal part of life.
Another factor is sleep, perhaps the most neglected component of adolescent wellbeing and one I have written about recently. Recent research reported by The Guardian found that teenagers are now sleeping less than ever, with screen use and social pressures among the key drivers of worsening sleep deprivation. The consequences include poorer mental health, academic difficulties and burnout. Exhaustion erodes resilience rapidly. A teenager revising until 1am while simultaneously doom-scrolling through social media is not building academic advantage; they are often dismantling their emotional capacity to cope.
There is also a wider societal question about what precisely we are preparing children for. Education policy tends to focus overwhelmingly on measurable attainment because attainment is easier to quantify than emotional stability. League tables cannot easily capture self-awareness, perspective or adaptability. Yet employers routinely identify resilience, communication skills and emotional intelligence as critical to career success. Universities also report undergraduates struggling with independence, stress management and perfectionism. One way of seeing examinations, therefore, is as a test of those skills as well as of one’s academic performance.
A resilient teenager is not one who never panics before an exam. It is one who can panic, recover and continue. Young people need opportunities to develop what psychologists sometimes call “distress tolerance”: the ability to sit with uncomfortable emotions without catastrophising them. That capacity should emerge gradually through ordinary experiences such as coping with setbacks, navigating disappointment and recovering from embarrassment, all things which every young person can and should experience. I know it is desperately tempting to try to protec them from it, but once we understand that these knocks that life brings are an essential part of our children’s learning, they can become a little easier to bear. The alternative is that adults become so desperate to protect their children from failure that they inadvertently make failure feel intolerable: when the failure comes, as it inevitably will, they will have no resources to deal with it.
Exam results matter. Of course they do. Educational achievement opens doors, expands opportunities and transforms lives. Pretending otherwise serves nobody. But the ability to withstand setbacks, regulate emotions and maintain perspective may matter even more in the long term. A young person who learns resilience acquires something more durable than a high grade: the confidence that difficult experiences can be survived. And that may well prove to be the most important lesson that their education can offer them.
