Three years ago, at the height of the Covid pandemic and with schools in England closed to all but the most vulnerable pupils, Daniel, 18, got up at 3am each morning to complete the remote learning sent by his school in Leicester. “It was the only time I could get enough quiet to do my work,” he said.
“During Covid each morning the school would send out emails with tasks to complete. I wanted to stay on top of the work, but at home I had no place to study.
“I was waking up at 3am, or at least trying to, to get some work done before everyone else would wake up. Otherwise I was having to do my school work scattered throughout the day.”
Back then, Daniel was studying for GCSEs that never happened, after the exams were scrapped in 2021. But this year Daniel is waiting to find out his A-level results, alongside hundreds of thousands of other sixth-formers for whom this was their first experience of high-stakes public exams.
“I think it wasn’t good, not having the experience of GCSEs to draw on. I didn’t know how to react going into my A-levels exams; I was feeling very anxious and stressed. So that’s one way that taking A-levels this year was definitely more difficult,” he said.
Another difficulty was the amount of learning that was missed during the early stages of the pandemic, as schools opted to skip large chunks of the curriculum.
For students like Daniel, that meant missing out on foundational parts of courses. Things improved last year, when Daniel enrolled at Wyggeston and Queen Elizabeth I state sixth-form college in Leicester, taking French, history and maths.
Daniel hopes to study law at the University of Warwick if he can meet the entry requirements. Like most of those taking A-levels, Daniel is aware that top grades are going to be harder to come by this year, due to the government’s insistence that grades return to the levels last seen in 2019.
“To me, it’s difficult to say how fair it feels. It’s just what happened, that I’m in the cohort where grades have to go down to normal pre-pandemic levels. I’ve just got to be realistic about that,” he said.
Like many of the students supported by the Social Mobility Foundation, Daniel will be the first in his family to attend university. As a migrant under the government’s EU resettlement scheme, Daniel doesn’t qualify for maintenance loans, so he will have to live at home when his course starts in autumn. A place at Warwick will mean a one-and-a-half hour journey each way, changing buses in Coventry – but Daniel says he can’t wait to start.
“I feel confident that I’ve got the grades that I need. I’m very excited to go to university and to get on to the next step,” Daniel said.
