There are very few pieces of paper capable of making a sixteen-year-old cry before breakfast, making their parents feel physically sick and causing an entire family to wake up several hours earlier than usual, teenagers included. A GCSE results sheet is one of them.
This morning, thousands of teenagers will have collected a handful of numbers that they have spent months, sometimes years, believing will tell them something fundamental about themselves. For some, those numbers will be a source of enormous joy and pride. For others, they will be a bitter disappointment. Most will fall somewhere in between, opening their results with a mixture of relief, excitement and mild bewilderment. What fascinates me is the disproportion between the importance we attach to results on this particular day and the significance they are likely to have in the lives of the people receiving them.
I do not mean to suggest that GCSE results are unimportant. That would be a rather glib thing to tell a sixteen-year-old who has just discovered that they have missed the grade they needed for the college course they wanted to pursue. Results have consequences: they can determine which subjects a student can go on to study, which courses they can access and, in some circumstances, which opportunities are available to them. Academic attainment at sixteen is also associated with a range of later outcomes, including employment and earnings, and there is evidence that GCSE results can be particularly consequential for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds.
So no, I am not going to tell disappointed students that their results “don’t matter”. They do matter. What I would like to suggest is that they don’t matter in quite the way that they currently think they do.
Sixteen is an extraordinarily young age at which to receive what feels like a definitive verdict on your intellectual capabilities. Yet this is exactly how examinations can come to feel. A student who has spent years being told that they are clever may look at one disappointing result and conclude that they have somehow been exposed as a fraud. Another who has always struggled may see a low grade as confirmation of something they have already come to believe about themselves. Even the student who gets a collection of grade 8s and 9s can be convinced they are a failure, if their parents have set them the heinous target of a perfect set of 9s.
A GCSE is an assessment of what you knew and could do in a particular subject, at a particular age, under a particular set of circumstances. That is, as it happens, a useful thing to know. It is not, however, a comprehensive psychological assessment. Your GCSE results cannot tell you whether you are going to be kind, funny, interesting, resilient, creative, courageous, generous, successful or happy, nor can they tell you what you are going to be good at for the rest of your life.
I am always struck by how little we remember about other people’s results once a few years have passed. Ask somebody in their thirties or forties what their school friends achieved at GCSE and most will struggle. They may remember the person who got a clutch of top grades and went on to medical school. They may remember somebody who failed spectacularly and was devastated at the time. They may remember their own results with surprising clarity (although these days, for my own part, I have to think quite hard about it). But the grades of the vast majority of the people they sat beside in the classroom have disappeared completely from memory.
This is particularly strange when you consider the emotional intensity of results day itself. At sixteen, it can seem as though everybody will remember what you achieved forever. The grade you received in English literature can feel like a permanent addition to your identity. You can almost hear the adults around you mentally filing you away: bright, average, disappointing, exceptional. Yet life has a rather irritating habit of refusing to respect these classifications.
People evolve. They discover things they did not know they were interested in. They meet people who alter the course of their lives. They leave school and discover that they are suddenly rather good at something nobody had ever noticed before. They fail at things they expected to succeed at and succeed at things they had assumed were beyond them. They make spectacularly bad decisions and, occasionally, spectacularly good ones. Some become doctors. Some become plumbers. Some become teachers. Some become artists. Some start businesses. Some spend twenty years doing something they thought they would love before deciding that they hate it and changing direction completely.
When I was sixteen, I had no idea what my eventual career would be. I certainly could not have predicted that I would spend my adult life teaching Latin. Had somebody shown me a list of the things that I would eventually do, I would probably have assumed that most of them belonged to somebody considerably more organised and sensible than me. Life does not unfold according to a careers questionnaire completed at sixteen. (I think the one I did told me I should be an analyst: I have still got absolutely no idea what that is).
There is a tendency, particularly on results day, to divide young people into winners and losers. Newspapers love photographs of teenagers holding up results sheets with enormous grins, surrounded by delighted parents and teachers. There is nothing wrong with celebrating success, and students who have worked hard and achieved the grades they wanted deserve every bit of the celebration they receive. But the visual language of results day can be rather unforgiving. One group gets to stand outside the school holding their grades aloft. Another group quietly disappears home, perhaps feeling that they have failed at something considerably larger than an examination. The reality is much messier. One student can achieve excellent grades and be miserable; believe me, I’ve met dozens of students like this and my heart aches for them. Another student can achieve disappointing grades and feel liberated. I always think of Robbie Williams, who got the call to say he had been selected to join a new boy band called Take That, just a couple of days after he had received his frankly atrocious GCSE results. Some students get exactly the results they wanted and discover six months later that they have chosen the wrong course. Others can miss their grades, take a different route and eventually find themselves thriving doing something they would never have considered had everything gone according to plan.
This is not an argument for pretending that educational achievement is irrelevant. Quite the contrary. Education opens doors, and some doors are considerably harder to open without particular qualifications. The point is that a door is an opportunity, not a destiny. GCSE results can influence the route you take through the next few years without determining where you eventually end up.
Perhaps this is why I find results day so emotionally complicated. It is entirely reasonable to be proud of a good result and entirely reasonable to be devastated by a bad one. What is unreasonable is to imagine that either response tells us very much about the person standing in front of us.
