Every GCSE results day, school halls buzz with the entire spectrum of human emotion. There’s pride and regret, utter elation and total despair. Relief that all that hard work has finally paid off, and usually a bit of bemusement when five years of doodling at the back of class has, somehow, culminated in a decent grade. For us teachers, it’s a chance to congratulate, to say goodbye, to commiserate or celebrate.
But in Manchester and the West Midlands this year, things will look very different. The government istrialling a new app, giving students the option to receive their results online instead of going into school. The plan is to eventually roll this out nationwide, following the lead of Scotland, which brought in a results app in 2019.
As a secondary school teacher, this feels like a massive step backwards. At my school, students currently have to come in to receive their results (or else have them posted to them afterwards). That may sound inconvenient or stuck in the past, but consider what support students might need once they hear how they’ve done. As with all teachers on results day, I’ve wiped away tears, advised on resits or remarking, and acted as a buffer between students and families who don’t understand why a grade is lower than expected. I’ve supported pupils when their marks have been higher than anticipated too – encouraging them to aim for a more competitive sixth form or college that they had assumed it was too late to consider. While students getting their grades through an app would, I hope, still be surrounded by the support of their loved ones, this isn’t the same as the expertise and experience of education staff.
I can see the education minister Stephen Morgan’s point when he says it’s “high time exam records were brought into the 21st century” and I can get behind the idea of bringing each student’s exam results into one set of digital education records (boy, would that have made my own life easier all those times I’ve scrambled for old GCSE certificates the night before a job interview) but results day is about so much more than receiving a list of grades. It’s the start of a new chapter, and it is teachers and schools that are best placed to guide students through these next steps.
As pointed out by James Bowen, assistant general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, schools and pupils will still need “seamless support” on results day in case issues arise, but my worry would be that, tempted with the ease of pressing a button at home, pupils would no longer access the wealth of knowledge their teachers and schools can offer them about their futures. Teenagers could be left to fester in their disappointment all summer at home without knowing what to do about it, or fail to make the most of higher-than-expected grades without experienced staff offering them some advice in person. When I think of the poorest students, without the guidance of educated parents well-versed in the system, it feels like this will only widen already growing class divides.
As a teacher, I always find results day a moving reminder that my job transcends just drilling Shakespeare quotes into teenagers’ heads. Some of the most fulfilling moments of my career have happened on those stifling days in the middle of August as I find out the fate of the young people I’ve stressed about as though they’re my own children. It’s a heady morning full of hugs and selfies, tactfully offered tissues and words of consolation. Many teachers cut their own holidays short to make sure they can be in school to guide students through the aftermath – positive or otherwise – of the grades they’ve received.
Friends of mine who teach in Scotland, where results by app have been an option for years, tell of pupils who still want to come to see their teachers after receiving their results online because, simply put, we offer our students something more than any app can. In the pilot scheme inEngland, I’m encouraged that while the results will come out at 11am on the app, they can be accessed at school from 8am – which I hope might incentivise students to make the trip.
Perhaps what really makes GCSE results day so special is that, like school in general, it is a communal, human, in-person event in a world that has been slowly dissolved into the cloud. When I think back to receiving my own exam results 15 years ago, it’s not the As, Bs and Cs themselves that are etched in my mind, but the high-fives from my proud teachers, the hugs with my friends, the advice from my heads of year and the poignancy of this leg of my educational journey ending in the very place it began. As someone who spends all my working hours with young people, I can’t help but feel sad that this core memory may not be available to the generations to come.
Nadeine Asbali is the author of Veiled Threat: On Being Visibly Muslim in Britain, and a secondary school teacher in London