When I was doing GCSEs and my sister was doing A-levels, we were on our way to school for my physics and her maths exams when we had a huge fight at the bus stop. I can’t remember what it was about, but she definitely started it. I took a different route and was 20 minutes late for my exam while she took the original bus and spent the first quarter of her paper getting asked by teachers if she knew where I was. The beauty of this story is that I got an A and she got a B, but the relevant bit is that our mum didn’t know any of this – didn’t know we’d fought, didn’t know I’d been late, didn’t know my sister had got distracted, didn’t know why I was laughing so hard on the third Thursday of August.
Parents are now asking for “exam leave” from work to get through their children’s GCSEs and A-levels. The sheer emotional investment – never mind the time, energy and organisation involved these days – is extraordinary. So I have to note from the outset that this is a choice: there was a time in living memory when parents just left kids to it, and we all survived.
