As exam season comes towards us, can we make the success of the children not the reputation of the school the main focus?

My son is in year 11 at a state secondary school. The other day he came home with a letter, sent to all year 11 parents. The letter outlined the school’s proposals regarding revision plans, classes and strategies related to Brad’s upcoming GCSE’s. To a year 11 parent, the letter serves first and foremost as useful information about opportunities available to my son. It also serves as a very welcome sign that the school is on top of if not ahead of the exam game. One might say that it’s purpose is to fulfill both of these aims, one explicit, the other implicit. However, there was one sentence in the letter that caught my attention and which made me feel immediately concerned, not just for Brad, not just for his cohort but for all of the current cohort countrywide who will take their GCSE’s this summer. It was the advice that Brad and his compadres should be doing "4 to 5 hours of focused active revision every day”. 

On first glance this seems like a fairly innocuous proposition. It is a sentence that one glosses over because well, it’s just a ridiculous proposition because not only is it unreasonable, it is also impossible! Brad gets up every morning at 7. He prepares his breakfast and packed lunch and sets off for school at about 8. He arrives at school at 8.30 when his school day begins. He has lessons all day. He leaves school at around 3 and arrives home at 4. He then does his homework for at least an hour, this takes him to 5 o’clock. Is the expectation that he then revises until 9 or 10 o’clock at night? When is he supposed to eat or God forbid, relax? So what or whose purpose does this advice really serve?

I know from my experience as a teacher and ex-head of Faculty, that the following 18 weeks are the most anxiety provoking in the school calendar. I also know that a particular focus of that anxiety is year 11. The honeymoon period of September when all was new, when everything seemed possible and all students paid attention has given way to October where routines are established and potential challenging pupils recognised and differentiated for. So far, so good. However, post half term, things begin to change. By November, many students in year 11 have retreated into denial. The upcoming challenges, reiterated by their teachers in every lesson, backed up by a sea of exemplars, mock exams, WAG grades and data drops mean that some students have drifted into the potentially safe psychic space of denial. Exams? What exams? And then what? Well, in my experience, teachers step forward into the space vacated by students and the anxiety the students deny and that shows itself in a devil may care attitude in lessons lodges firmly in the teacher. This filters up to heads of department, heads of year, senior leadership teams. Here it festers, like gnawing knot in team meetings, SLT meetings; what’s to be done about year 11? It then rains back down on heads of department, heads of year etc, first in a series of demands for clearer data, more focused intervention, more effort all round. This is translated into a series of accusations against year 11’s, the sum of which is politely phrased as “They just don’t care!”

With so much riding on year 11 results, not just for students but for staff and for the whole school’s reputation: good results mean better calibre student applications, more money, better staff applications, adults panic. Poor results mean more pressure on teachers, department heads, head teachers. Poor results mean closer scrutiny, fewer student applications, less money. So when students retreat, staff advance and they advance with cutlasses between their teeth and with all guns blazing.

By December, everyone is exhausted. Many teachers feel as though they are having little impact and for all the revision cards they have suggested all the cards, the best hand lays with the students and their willingness to play the game. By this time in the year, each year 11 student has heard the phrase “your GCSE’s” a thousand times, maybe two thousand. Every class they go to the teachers are reminding them of the importance of this year, every school assembly is GCSE related, many tutor times have a GCSE focus. Any student who might not be focused in lessons is reminded that they are not only letting themselves down but is letting the whole class down. Finally the teacher has the big stick of potential life failure to beat their students with and many of us - me included- can feel the effectiveness of its weight in our hands. But even with all of this rhetoric, the weight of reality on our sides, the passing hours, days and months heading in one exam filled horizon, some students just continue to resist. And in a way, why wouldn’t they? Having let them coast through school to this point - because the schools focus has been on previous exam cohorts - this year group are suddenly in demand. Students might be forgiven for feeling that the adults aren’t in charge of this problem. Are they panicking? For once, the students are in charge and, whether they do it consciously or not, they often withhold their enthusiasm and commitment as a way of reminding teachers that these GCSE’s belong to them; the choice to succeed or fail is theirs and theirs alone.

So, come January, what can be done? I have worked in 4 state schools and each one has responded the same way to this problem; keep raising the stakes, upping the threats, arranging interventions every lunchtime, every evening after school, arranging ‘How to revise’ evenings for parents. There is nothing wrong with these initiatives. Far from it. One might be concerned if schools didn’t offer students these resources. However, there is a communication in all of this that hovers like a ghost in every intervention room, revision evening and, dare I say, every letter that goes home to parents. It’s the communication that the teachers, the school have slightly lost the plot. Insisting that a child do 5 hours revision every day is a case in point.

And what’s worse, this kind of mania can be both ineffective and potentially irresponsible.

Every year, and I see no reason why this year will be any different, a number of teenagers in year 11 suffer mental illness, breakdown or suicide due to exam stress and every year there is outcry about it and a collective agreement that something needs to be done, that some other way of helping students approach exam time needs to be found and implemented. And then the exams are over, everyone’s exhausted. Year 11 students leave. However, there’s little time to reflect; it’s time to focus on the current year 10’s! So it starts all over again.

When I contacted the school and objected to the language of the letter, I expressed the fact that I thought this demand was both ineffective and irresponsible. I gave evidence of my son’s school day and his current commitments to homework. I said that the demands being placed on him and his cohort were unreasonable. I received a quick reply. The respondee said that he agreed that the 5 hour demand was unreasonable and that it didn’t really apply to students like my son. It was aimed, I was told, at the students who currently weren’t even doing one hour a week! So the letter home was a sort of mind game. The thought was that when the lazy students see the 5 hours requirement, they will get a fright and knuckle down to doing an hour or two. However, I would argue that if you say 5 in the minimum requirement, anybody who might do 2 is probably wondering why they should bother. 

As ever, it is not the robust children who are threatened here. Brad, seeing the 5 hour demand, instantly dismissed it as ‘silly’ and ‘ridiculous’. Many of his circle will do the amount of revision they need to do because that’s what they have been resourced to do by parents who not only see the value of education but know the nuts and bolts of its vocabulary, understand its nuances. The children this kind of alarmist tactic is supposedly aimed at are, as the reply to my email stated, “the children who haven’t done one hour of revision”. Presumably one of the reasons they haven’t done one hour of revision is that they don’t know where to start. Not just with the practical task of revising for a subject or the mechanics of how to revise but to go from being a student who has passed relatively unnoticed in school for years to one from whom great things are expected. A student who, on one level is being asked not only to achieve the best for themselves but are being asked to help the adults to achieve the best for themselves too. With such high stakes clearly visible, they might rather fail under their own steam rather than capitulate and be branded a failure by those adults who are currently bombarding them with threats.

There is a term in Organisational Psychology called the “sentient task”. The sentient task is the task those in the organisation can be observed to be carrying out and which is demonstrated in the actions they. The interesting thing about the sentient task is that it can work against what the organisation is set up to do; the primary task. So the primary task of a school at exam time - the main business that it sets to carry out - is to prepare students for exams. The focus should be on the students, their needs, the best way to get them through the exams. However, I would argue that with stakes so high; the school needs the results; the teachers avoid negative consequences later; less scrutiny, less pressure, no one loses their job, more applicants, more money etc, the sentient task of the organisation becomes centred around the adults avoiding problems for themselves. Let me clear, no one does this on purpose. Teachers are good people but they are only human. It is only natural to look after oneself. However, when this is translated into whole school action - what can be observed in that action is the drive to save the school rather than to help the children can begin to leak out in its narrative and when that happens something gets lost.

I am not arguing that there should be no pressure at exam time. Research shows that exams do have a place in the development of young minds and rightly in our learning culture. Exams allow students to know the extent their skills have developed and shows them what they might need to do if they want to improve at that skill. Exams introduce children to the reality of competition. In any environment their skills will often be compared and considered against those of their peers - in job interviews for example. What exams should not be is a way that schools are judged against other schools, against funding models, against government targets. If this is the purpose of exams, and people’s jobs begin to depend on whether pupils succeed or fail then this threat will become a large part of the way those exams are planned and implemented. In this scenario,the focus comes off the students and onto the teachers, onto the head, onto the governors, onto the system and the sentient task becomes linked to survival. 

I don’t know whether it’s better in Finland or Sweden or Holland. Personally I like teaching in England with diverse groups of children and with diverse and dedicated staff teams. Exam time is tough, that’s a reality and teachers, in my experience always step up to the plate and give one hundred and twenty percent. They go above and beyond. I am arguing or calling only for balance and maturity. Remember that we are the grown ups here and what we communicate to students at this time of year can not only help them pass their exam, it can demonstrate that we, the grown ups are in charge of ourselves, that we have the children as our focus and we will do what it takes to help them pass their exams, safeguard their mental health, cement their futures and in some cases save their lives.