Meaningless meetings, Manic intervention schedules, inter-subject jealousies - Exam Pressure can make everyone a little crazy…

The madness of exam time...

Like the constellation of a busy family, a school can be seen as the constant collision and elision of individuals and groups. But how is this world of groups affected by the pressing external pressure of exams and can the psychology surrounding group dynamics help us plan exam time more productively. The interpretations here are my own, drawn from 15 years of ‘exam seasons’ – they are speculative, informed by my experience and 6 years psychological training.

Klein, Bion and theories of individual and group anxieties

According to Melanie Klein(1959), there exists in each of us an instinctive drive for three basic gratifications; to be warm, to be held, to be fed. When these needs are being partly or wholly gratified, the anxiety that arises due to their absence is abated. These drives are, for the most part ‘unconscious’, their presence can be felt as life-giving and nurturing and that their absence can feel persecutory and life threatening - even in adult life.

Bion(1961)amplified that these basic human instincts for survival are at play in any group “in his contact with the complexities of life in a group the adult resorts in what may be a massive regression to the mechanisms described by Melanie Klein…”(p141 Experiences in Groups) Bion prescribes that the group can, for individual members, be both the source of gratification if anxieties within it are ‘held’ or “contained” long enough for members to imbibe its life affirming qualities. Conversely, groups can also be the source of frustration if the individual feels paralysed, diminished, isolated and persecuted through membership. In the former the ‘feeding’ and ‘holding’ and human ‘warmth’ allows individual members to tolerate anxieties; both their own and other people’s long enough to flourish. In the latter, it is likely that members will ‘split off’ the parts of themselves that feel diminished, frustrated, angry or lost and locate these feelings in other members of the group. The primary task of this group will be to invent ways of not feeling the anxiety rather than completing the task they are there to perform.

Year 11’s rule! Exam pressures threaten livelihoods, induce fear, and invert learning relationships.

Funding and status in line with exam results; particularly the results of the year 11 cohort.

Within the set up and operational dynamics of any school there is a dreadful fear of failure. Fear creates a paralysis, an inability to act and take risks. The unconscious task of the system becomes avoidance of this fear rather than the acceptance of the responsibility and complexity of providing a flourishing education arena.

With so much at stake, the individual child taking their GCSE exams in the hope and belief that these exams will enhance their life chances it becomes difficult to keep in mind. Added to that, learning relationships become inverted. Teachers and management groups, particularly those who might lose status or even jobs and livelihoods if the school fails, become unconsciously ‘dependant’ on the year 11 children in their care. This power shift resonates both in and out of classrooms and groups find ways of dealing with this that aren’t always conducive to generative, exploratory and effective learning.

By denying the children much of the natural expression, exploration and discovery that is natural during adolescence, anxiety is avoided. In my experience, operating systems in schools has changed in order to restrict expression and so reduce anxiety. This is demonstrated in  in the way the curriculum is delivered. Year 10 and year 11 groups are taught in ‘blocks’ at the same time in the same way in the same classrooms. Lesson plans are prescribed to teachers and progress is monitored through regular and regulated testing.

It is not surprising that as the year 11 exams begin to roll around, at staff meetings all over the country Assistant Head teachers are consistently displaying reams of baffling data and referring to pupils as ‘units’. Rather than holding individuals in mind, we have come to hold data in mind. Well qualified and dedicated teaching professionals stand or fall on the production of such data. This is depersonalising across the spectrum. However, it succeeds in reducing the anxiety of those perpetrating such a system because it simplifies human relationships.

I have experienced – and even been responsible for – many years of the revision and intervention cycle that is in full swing right now.  During the most recent exam season, the ‘manic’ way revision classes were organised could be seen as evidence of how, when anxiety is overwhelming groups and institutions stop thinking. Firstly, there was little or no coordination of revision classes across the school. Classes were scheduled at the same time in core subjects. Other subjects were not prioritised at all and decisions about which classes took priority was decided ‘on the run’. Gordon Lawrence wrote that an organisation needs to ask itself 3 important questions. 1. What do we say we are doing? 2. What do we really believe we are doing? and 3. What is really going on? It is clear that although what the school would say they were doing is educating young people and what they believe they were doing would be preparing pupils for important exams, what was really going on was manic and chaotic avoidance of the feeling that the school was at some level about to fail. 

Added to that, revision classes, although run for the whole year group were, naturally, taught by specific teachers. As an English teacher, I may teach the structuring of a poem differently to a colleague, I may, according to my own skills and leanings spend more time on certain aspects of a novel or allow more ‘interpretations’ to come from the pupils. My class, used to and practised at recognising and using one particular way of thinking developed in a relationship with me were taught different and disparate methods by different teachers with whom they had no relationship at exam time. Many pupils came out of some revision sessions more confused than when they went in. 

Jealousies and Behaviour Issues

I have emphasised the dependent relationship the school has with its year 11 cohort. As defence against these feelings of dependence, distance is set up between pupil and teacher through the language and attitudes they have to these pupils. Vega Roberts writes “…in some institutions the dominant defence is to accentuate differences: ‘they’ are the…needy ones; ‘we’ are the strong…ones”.  Teachers say things like “No matter how many times I explain it, they just don’t get it!”

There comes with Exam Season a single-minded blindness that is put forward as ‘being positive’. I am all for being encouraging and supportive but there is a certain madness in blind idealism and I believe it shows up at this time as a defence. If year 11 can only represent success, their potential failure must be denied. What also must be denied and placed ‘elsewhere’ is any anger, disappointment, guilt or otherwise associated with them not doing well. As this anger and fear of failure needs to be placed somewhere, I believe that it often finds its home in year 10. Year 10 are after all, the next generation of year 11’s. They represent an enormous trial of future dependency, denial, failure and confusion. The school looks at year 10 and knows that all of this effort has to be repeated again next year. Consequently, the rhetoric surrounding year 10 is such that it’s as though they have already failed.

In a recent year 10 assembly, the day year 11 finally left the school, it was interesting to note that year 10 were shown two pictures. One picture, used to advertise the school to parents and taken for the school brochure, by a professional photographer, depicted happy smiling year 11 girls in their new school uniforms at the beginning of the year. A second depicted a group of year 10 girls taken by one of their friends on their mobile phone. The girls were posing as though they were on an album cover, they were recognisable as individuals in the picture, albeit not representations that the school might wish to use to advertise to parents. The assistant head said they were ‘leery and aggressive’. They were, it seemed, the place where feelings of failure and the impossibility of the task ahead were being located.

Groups find a way

It would be wrong to give the impression that due to unwanted anxieties and fear of failure by management, that the whole school had lost the ability to form meaningful learning relationships. Although certain drives for groups to avoid anxiety might dominate, they do not tell the whole story. If an individual cannot find gratification in one place or groups then she will look elsewhere. So, in school. Relationships form between individual pupils or groups of pupils and individual teachers. Classrooms become places of safety for both pupils and staff and a system that insists in mechanistic formality fosters enclaves where human informality will flourish. These groups place their anxieties in the system that purports to want to support them – the group ‘outside’ this safe classroom, with this this teacher who knows them. In my experience, it is often the year 11 cohort that teaches the school the hard lessons concerning resilience. They are the ones who, despite all of the pressure, rise to meet it using all of the resources at their disposal

Although they are influenced by the pedagogy of the school, they also have other internal and external influences that might counter negative effects and feelings. They become less idealistic about their potential exam performance. The reality of the outside world and their imminent ejection into it mean that for many, their own shortcomings can no longer be denied. In order to survive they will have to work together with other members of the group to achieve what needs to be done.