It could have been worse, as some parents will doubtless be whispering even now through a furiously slammed teenage bedroom door. GCSE grades were always going to have to come down, eventually, from the artificially inflated high of the pandemic years; and when they did, it was never going to be fair. How could it be? So there will have been tears for some, on ripping open the envelope, with only 22.4% of entries in England this year getting grades 7 to 9 – an A or A* in old money – down from a peak of 30% in 2021, when exams were scrapped and teachers had to guesstimate grades.
Worst hit of all are those who would probably have managed the required grade 4 in English and maths, if they had sat the exams last year – but not this, and now having to face demoralising resits and worries about finding a job. That Wales and Northern Ireland chose to keep marking more generously for another year only adds salt to the wound elsewhere.
But pass rates are still very slightly ahead of 2019 levels, and at least heads of sixth forms are offering to be flexible with those who just missed out on entry requirements for A-levels. If future employers make themselves equally mindful of which year drew the short stick, the damage could be limited. What these results do offer, however, now the dust has settled and all the results-day TikToks have been posted, is a clearer glimpse of Covid-19’s long, anxiously twitching tail.
What has been worrying teachers for months in the run-up to exams is a stubbornly persistent rise in children missing from class – absences are still running at more than double the rate of the pre-Covid years, with one in 20 teenagers in their GCSE year missing at least half of their classes – and also a rise in mental health problems, especially among girls. (More than one in five 16-year-old girls were in contact with NHS mental health services last year). Talk to teachers, and it’s clear those two seemingly separate phenomena are intimately connected.
What schools describe is less a wave of hardened truants bunking off to do something more exciting, and more a rising tide of anxiety making children want to hide beneath a duvet. The new absentees are typically emotionally overwhelmed and vulnerable, not defiant. They’re disproportionately likely to be living in poverty or to have special educational needs and disabilities that make life in busy mainstream classrooms tough. This summer, heads reported unusually large numbers of children simply failing to turn up for exams, or panicking and walking out in the middle.
As Evelyn Forde, president of the Association of School and College Leaders, puts it: “For some of them, mentally and emotionally, they just found it too much.” There is a worrying fragility to this generation of teenagers that arguably predates Covid-19. Back in 2019, Theresa May’s report State of the Nation 2019, concluded that children’s wellbeing and mental health had declined over the previous decade. That seems to have worsened amid the uncertainty and disruption of recent years, the consequences of which are now perhaps coming to light.
This year’s GCSE results show the gap between state and private schools, which widened alarmingly during lockdown, has shrunk a bit – though detailed examination of what’s happened to the gap between rich and poor must wait for the autumn. The longstanding north-south divide looks, however, if anything more clearly entrenched. Only 17.6% of entries in the north-east – which had the highest absence rate in the country, alongside the south-west – got a grade 7 or above; in London, where absence rates were lowest, 28.4% did.
So much for levelling up. For all the longstanding concerns about underachieving boys, meanwhile, this year they have slightly narrowed the gap with girls, who were, coincidentally or not, slightly more likely than boys to miss lessons.
Nobody in education, from the secretary of state downwards, needed this year’s exam results to tell them that children do better when they come to school every day. Ministers are already expanding a pilot scheme offering mentors to children at risk of dropping out, and encouraging heads to share ideas for getting them back.
Earlier this summer I visited some outstanding schools that are getting children through the door against the odds. But even they are not necessarily finding it easy. Something seems to have happened to children during the pandemic that adults haven’t properly understood or helped them get over; and while teachers are doing their best to pick up the pieces, it can’t be solely their job.
For the whole of my life as a parent, I have watched politicians fighting over education – everything from which dead poets should feature on the curriculum to more titanic battles over free schools and academies, Sats tests and Ofsted priorities – with varying degrees of weariness. But increasingly, from a school gate perspective, it’s all beginning to sound faintly surreal. It’s not that parents have suddenly started caring less about teaching standards, or bagging a place in the secondary of their choice, but that many of us now worry more about children’s deeper wellbeing and about the questions to which nobody really seems to have answers.
Why are children’s anxiety levels seemingly so much higher than they were a decade ago – so high, apparently, that some seemingly can’t leave the house in the mornings? Has their mental health genuinely worsened, or are we simply better at diagnosing things that in the past were probably missed? Could we even be too quick, sometimes, to pathologise teenage emotions that would once have been considered intense but normal? Has growing up steeped in social media scarred our kids somehow, or is tech just an easy scapegoat? Is the endless culture of testing in schools helping or harming? And then the nagging one that keeps parents awake at night: did we unwittingly do something wrong? Did we push too hard, or coddle too much?
What’s baffling is that while political parties nibble tentatively at the edges of all this – offering a few measly million more for children’s mental health services here, a bit more regulation of social media there – none of them seems bold enough to draw all these threads together.
Where is the sense of national urgency, the royal commission on the declining happiness of children, the public figures opening up difficult conversations? Even the official inquiry into Covid-19 was criticised, earlier this month, by children’s charities for what they called “unacceptable delays” in seeking evidence from and about under-18s. This year’s exam results should mark the beginning and not the end of a meaningful inquiry into how the pandemic has already changed our children, and threatens to shape their future for some time to come.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
