Is the Covid Cohort marked down for life?
Some children face leaving school having never sat an exam. Annabel Heseltine assesses the impact
As schools begin to brace themselves for January closures and children are sent home with laptops for remote lessons, their hopes are dashed once more. With that, my heart weeps at the thought that January mocks might be cancelled again. I have already nursed three of my four children’s bedroom blues over GCSEs (cancelled), A-levels (cancelled) or BTECs (thankfully not cancelled) while they did their best to hide in bed. My third child, Rafferty, who is nearly 18, now looks set to become a part of the Covid Cohort – the ones that never got to take a national examination at all.
I expected him to grin and say “well, that lets me off the hook” when news came that his GCSEs had been cancelled, but I will never forget his reaction. With every ounce of maturity that a sixteen-year-old boy can muster, he grumbled about how all the work he had done had been wasted, and then pulled the duvet back over his head.
With reports of its accelerating spread, omicron not only threatens to put the kibosh on Christmas, but on next year, too. Only a week ago, Nadhim Zahawi, the Education Secretary, tweeted that all children should stay in school. Now he has warned he cannot guarantee that all schools will be open next term, and yet promises he will do all in his power to keep children in class. Parents are up in arms.
One friend texted me earlier this week, along with an expletive directed at Covid, to say that her son’s school was sending him home a day early. I already had an email in my inbox telling me that Rafferty was not expected back at school in January until nearly a week later than scheduled – he’s upstairs now, working hard, perhaps for an exam he will never take. What will this do for his self-esteem?
The truth is that children are as worried as their parents. The eldest daughter of Laurence Miller, the commercial director of a West End theatre, is in Year 11 and due to take her GCSE mocks in January. “She’s read the news and is nervous. She is working very hard but is worried about what is ahead. She and her friends want to do their exams properly,” he says, adding that children should enjoy an undisrupted education. “Covid is here and we have to live with it.”
“It’s all parents are talking about,” says magazine publisher Camilla van Praagh, who was at a dinner party with lawyers and highfliers last Saturday. She worries about the additional pressure such aspirational parents can place on their children. “Parents are in floods of tears, literally wailing, because their child isn’t going to take their A-levels. I have taken a different attitude. I don’t want my son to worry, so I am not going to worry about it. He didn’t take GCSEs, so it’s not fair to ask him to jump to A-levels,” she explains.
“Not knowing is really tough,” says Lara Pechard, headmistress of St Margaret’s, an independent school in Hertfordshire which has 560 pupils, including 60 international boarders. “The children all want exams. They are not asking for a pass. My main worry is that they become the year group who never sat any exams. The risk is that they might never be taken seriously.”
For not only did this Covid Cohort have to deal with cancelled exams, they were then subjected to accusations of “grade inflation”. This age group is concerned about how it will be judged in the future.
Michael Smyth, director of studies at St Mary’s Calne, a girls’ independent school in Wiltshire, doesn’t believe you can compare the work done by the Covid Cohort with any other group, either positively or negatively. “‘Grade inflation’ is the wrong terminology,” he says. “The 2021 Teacher Assessed Grades (TAG) were awarded on evidence produced in exam conditions. And the Centre Assessment Grade (CAG) process of 2020 was different again. In both pandemic years, those grades were deserved. It is a little like comparing apples, oranges and pears. Since March 2020, everyone has struggled with the relentless uncertainty of the pandemic. Would the pupils have preferred to take public exams? Yes. Have pupils adapted to and excelled in the different process of determining grades? Yes. They are probably much more resilient now than ever before. Whether the pupils are at a disadvantage with future employers remains to be seen, but it would be a failing on the part of Ofqual and the Department for Education if this were the case.”
But one mother of an 18-year-old girl worries that teacher-pupil relationships are exacerbating anxieties. “My daughter has had a very tough time,” she said. “She was so upset and worried about her GCSEs that she had a breakdown. We thought she was in her room working but she just couldn’t cope. She had just been diagnosed with ADD and felt isolated and unable to see her friends. Her results were so bad that the school was suggesting that she didn’t take her A-levels. The problem about teacherassessed examinations is that this can be influenced by the relationship with the teacher and some girls are very manipulative, which makes it more difficult for the less confident girls.”
Exams are not fun – but they are a rite of passage. They teach us how to plan or cram; to focus for a short, highly stressful period of time and prepare to perform our best. “It is important for young people to learn
‘If this year group has no exams, the risk is that they might never be taken seriously’
how to manage exam stress, or failure,” says Paula Talman, a paediatric nurse and founder of iSpace Wellbeing, the mental health curriculum for schools. “Otherwise, when they are older, anxiety and avoidance of stressful situations can cause them to stay in their comfort zones rather than stepping out into an unfamiliar zone to take risks, explore, flourish and grow.”
It’s a concern echoed by Rachel Kelly, mental health advocate and author of Singing in the Rain: An Inspirational Workbook who went through lockdown with her own teenagers, but spends much of her time visiting state and independent schools holding mental health workshops to raise morale among students. Having spent many hours talking to pupils about their concerns, she broadly divides them into two categories.
The children and young adults she describes as part of “generation grit” are middle class, privileged and independent school-educated. For them, she says, the experience has been largely positive, making them stronger. “They are learning to deal with feeling anxious, bored and lonely. They may not be suffering from mental health conditions, so much as learning to deal with the realities of life. Covid could be the event from which they emerge as the most psychologically resilient of their generation,” she says.
And then there are the “Covid kids” from disadvantaged backgrounds, living in difficult households, away from school and finding it difficult to access Wi-Fi and computers. For those children, losing the ritual and sense of a rite of passage and identity offered by the rigmarole of exams has been very difficult, says Kelly.
But it isn’t straightforward. Even among the more privileged young people, there has been guilt and insecurity akin to impostor syndrome. “One private-school boy,” says Kelly, “had taken his exams remotely. He had done very well, securing a string of 9s. But he said, ‘I feel like an impostor.’ It all felt too cosy. They were 16, feeling that they were becoming young adults and they needed the validation of being marked by a stranger. It needed to feel fair.”
Teenagers like my son need to feel that their hard work is not in vain. They can’t be left wondering whether they would have done as well had they not been marked by their teachers. This is as important for their self-esteem as for their concerns about how they will be judged in the future.