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We blight children’s lives for the sake of five good GCSEs

We celebrate exam success but ignore the plight of those unable to thrive in our pressured, rigid system.

As misleading cliches go, those celebratory GCSE results-day photographs have to be right up there. For a lot of children – and a lot of parents – tableaux of happy, smiling teenagers, hugging each other in delight, are the final insult. These are yearly examples of the 16-year-old gold standard, the kind of child you must aspire to bring up. If your 16-year-old doesn’t fit in that picture, or had to be dragged into it, subjugated, resentful, kicking and screaming, then you, the parent, didn’t even scrape a C, let alone an A*.

Results day, and the attendant hoopla, is insidious propaganda. It’s the day the media decide to portray most of Britain as one big public school, where academic excellence and clean hair is all that matters. Sure, there will be some heartwarming stories from a flagship academy. Sure, the occasional celebrity – Jeremy Clarkson, Kirstie Allsopp – will drop a tweet declaring that it’s not such a big deal: we didn’t cover ourselves in glory at school, and look at us now! Good on them. It’s a comfort.

But most of us know people doing rubbish jobs that they hate, feeling trapped and frustrated, a bit bitter, a bit beaten – and also know that things started going wrong for them when they were still listlessly dragging themselves through the best days of other people’s lives. Those photos of GCSE success are like a lot of things in our culture: sweet icing on a cake baked from fear.

Our children are taught to fear failure. They’re taught to feel shame. School is serious. Childhood is serious. There is little room for rebellion or mistakes, not much in the way of different routes or second chances. Few people really know at 16 what they want to do with the rest of their lives. Still, there they all are, choosing A-levels with a view to university. The high cost of higher education should logically mean that people take more time to knock about for a bit, deciding what they want to study and why. Instead, even a gap year is increasingly seen as “falling behind”.

Deborah Orr

27 August 2016

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/27/blight-childrens-lives-five-good-gcses-exam-success

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