It starts 24 hours before, with a niggling knot in your stomach and a sense of doom that will not shift. Your appetite fades. You feel anxious and uptight. In bed, unable to sleep, you toss and turn, haunted by memories of exam halls and the scratching of pen on paper. In a few hours, a set of grades will determine your future. If this is how you feel, god only knows what’s going through the minds of your students.
Results day: when the sword of Damocles is swinging so close that it could give you a shave to make seasoned barbers jealous. It is, of course, a day of heightened tension: students will finally find out if their hard work has paid off or, in some cases, whether that last-minute revision made up for two years of never actually opening a book (spoiler alert: it didn’t). It is a day of joy for some, whose smiling faces and excitement will make you remember why you became a teacher. For others, it means disappointment and regret.
One results day I found myself taking a tearful girl to the side and running through her options, phoning around local colleges and working out a plan of action. In the end, she was happy with her choices and came back a year later to tell me just how much she loved her course. A set of bad results does not have to be the end of the line for a student, but merely a detour on the way to where they want to be.
If a teacher or school gets a bad results, on the other hand, let’s just say that optimism and encouraging words are often in short supply. For teachers, results day is not the end; it is the dawn of a new academic year. I’ve been in a school when the results were phenomenal and there was an exuberance and excitement that lifted us well into September, ready to face a fresh onslaught with our banners raised high (adorned with our achievement data in a bold font). The more senior members of staff warned the young, naive teachers that good results would just mean higher targets for the next year’s cohort. And they were right, we would become victims of our own success. But we ignored that thought while having a pint down the pub afterwards, slapping each other on the back, revelling in the golden glow of our value-added scores.
I have also seen the other side of results day – or rather, achievement armageddon – when grades were not what they were expected to be. We put on brave faces for the students and applauded their individual successes, knowing that there would be tears in the privacy of the staffroom.
When the results are bad, you can almost see the four horsemen of the apocalypse riding towards you over the playing fields. A tone is set on results day that intensifies throughout the year, with whispered threats of Ofsted and increased lesson observations, scrutiny and passive aggressive intervention meetings. In one friend’s school, the staff were shepherded into the hall after a set of disappointing results to be told that the poor grades would probably end in staff being asked to leave, thus introducing a Hunger Games-style management strategy that left colleagues competing with one another for their jobs and livelihoods.
And with disappointing results comes the inevitable autopsy of the data. I have found myself on many a results day, highlighter in hand, working out exactly which students’ papers I need to send back to be remarked. As an English specialist, I have seen the marking of the GCSE tighten up to almost draconian standards, with students who are clearly working at a C grade denied a pass by one or two marks.
I started a new job this year in a sixth form and met a wonderful young man who has failed his English GCSE on five occasions: each time by a single mark. Yet he perseveres without complaint. If he doesn’t pass this year my complaints will echo around the school and contain a level of profanity that would make Irvine Welsh blush.
So this year, I will stand there, knot in stomach and heart in mouth, waiting to find out how my lovely students have done. I will celebrate and commiserate in equal measure, safe in the knowledge that the end of their journey is just the start of a new and more demanding challenge for me and my colleagues. But hopefully an end to the sleepless nights, at least for a little while.
