It is A-level results week, and I like to spend it scandalising young people with my reminiscing. That probably sunny August morning on which my results arrived, in 1989, I didn’t open the envelope until I had smoked all the cigarettes in the house – 26 in total. It took ages, and by the time I had small capital letters to read, I could barely see. Kids are always so shocked by this, and I can never figure out whether what horrifies them is that an 18-year-old smoked at home, the sheer amount of smoking or the neurotic procrastination. I no longer get any uptake from my own kids, who have heard it, but I never fail to get a – I like to think awestruck – “Did you really?”, from their friends, and I always go: “I don’t know why you’re so surprised, I’m vaping right now,” even though I did know they would be surprised, otherwise I wouldn’t have said it.
The world has changed so much in the however-many decades it is since I took my A-levels. Grades have changed, university has changed, the jobs market has changed, the concept of work has changed, students have changed, and yet the suite of responses to this moment remains exactly the same. The Telegraph splashes with a pretty blond student looking happy, other papers of note worry about either grade inflation or grade deflation. On social media, the empathy-wing of the teaching profession reminds us that all the kids worked really hard and deserve congratulation, and this hopefully ignites our better selves, so then a load of onlookers do a generic: “Congratulations on your results! If it’s what you hoped for, wonderful. If it isn’t, remember that [insert platitude about life] happens to everyone.”
A lot of grownups will then insist that they can’t even remember what A-levels they got, which strikes me as pretty unlikely, unless the answer is “none”. If you can’t remember three grades, you are going to struggle to remember the date of the battle of Marston Moor. Some people then appoint themselves consoler-in-chief, and recount their glorious failures, the three Ds they received and the universal prognostications of a doomed future, which through hard work and pluck, they turned into a business empire.
It must be weird to be 18, listening to a cacophony of advice with almost no practical application. I don’t want to say the stakes are higher now, but they are definitely different to the point of being unrecognisable. People who went to university pre-tuition fees still talk about results, and all the possible choices that emerge from them, as an experimental phase – a guitar solo in the song of life. Here you stand, on the brink of whatever establishment will take you, and that’s where you’ll find yourself, express yourself, create yourself and get to make terrible decisions that don’t have consequences. You may get a solid degree in a subject that interests you in the margins of that, but don’t sweat it if you don’t.
Maybe I’m going out on a limb, here, but I don’t think that is how students look at university any more. They all seem to work incredibly hard. A third of them can’t afford to leave home. Almost all of them are going to be paying for the privilege for the next 20 years. It is about as heavy a decision as an 18-year-old could be entrusted with, and it all hangs on these grades, which may be as random and luck-based as they were in 1989, but are quite a bit more freighted.
Meanwhile, post-pandemic, exam results have carried a depressing message about the state of the nation. In 2022, what they call the “disadvantage gap” – the difference in average point scores between the poorest and richest – was the highest since that data was first collated in 2017, and this year is expected to be worse. That is going to be my new stock response to results day: congratulations – what you have here is some crunchy data for the coming class war. Use it wisely. And don’t smoke, it’s bad for you.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
