A-Level results day (15th August 2024) has, in recent years, become overwhelmed with social media posts proclaiming that "results don't matter!" and shouting as loudly as possible about business success stories who "weren't academically successful, but are now doing way better than that person in their class who got straight As!"
This bandwagon may have started as a genuine desire to offer comfort to teenagers who were shattered by their first encounter with a particularly harsh reality: that hard work doesn't always guarantee the results you want, or need. However, it's now become nothing more than a particularly toxic stage for adults to centre themselves and their achievements - "Hey, look at me, kids, I f--ked up completely in school, because I thought it was stupid and boring, and I'm doing okay!"
This does harm on several levels:
1. It takes away the pride and sense of achievement which are the foundations of self-esteem and self-confidence from those who did do well in their exams, especially when their strong results came through recognised hard work, rather than a natural talent for academic pathways.
2. It deliberately avoids acknowledging the level of human networks, social support, and (usually other peoples') money it took for those "achievers" to even get their entry-level start. It ignores how often "failed at school, aced out in life" types lie and break the law to get their business where they want it to be. It ignores how often these "success stories" come serious croppers because their lack of academic background meant they didn't understand a contract, or they couldn't navigate complex regulatory requirements.
3. It denigrates the genuine hard work, and often very stressful experiences of very real poverty, the points of facing ruin, the times when all that can be done is sell everything, and start again from nothing, that faces the self-employed, painting 'entrepreneurship' and self-employment as an easy option that only requires "a clear vision" and "initiative, grit, and resilience." If initiative, grit, and resilience were guarantors of success, the global south wouldn't be experiencing the levels of poverty it currently is.
4. It puts native citizen populations in the UK at significant risk of losing out on well-paid, progression-opportunity roles to people from countries where academic achievement is still very highly valued, and everyone in those countries is genuinely driven to achieve strong grades - particularly in a world that is increasingly global and remote; to have a comfortable standard of living in Delhi, India, you need around 45,000Rupees per month. In the UK, at the current (20th Aug 2024) exchange rate, that's just £412.80 - just over a week's take-home UK National Minimum Wage pay. With higher-paid jobs far more likely than minimum wage jobs to be remote. A yearly decent cost of living in Delhi is 540,000Rupees. That's less than £5,000. In a top-flight job, where academic qualifications are still important, an academically high-achieving 19yr old in Delhi, who is able to work remotely could make not just themselves, but also their family, very wealthy. They can earn a comfortable yearly income in a month in the right jobs.
"All them foreigners" aren't stealing opportunities from British young people - British adults who tell them that "exams don't matter", and "academic types never achieve anything anyway" are stealing opportunities. Because the global south very much prioritises education; yes, there are 15, 16, 17yr olds working physically exhausting manual labour jobs in mineral mines across the global south - you know, the kinds of jobs young people are told their parents and grandparents "took pride in doing at your age - none of this namby-pambying eternal education in my day!" - but when they are able to speak freely? Those young people want to be in school - but they can't afford to be. Their families can't afford to send them. They want machinery and automation to replace them - but their countries have often made it too expensive and bureaucratically complex for mine owners to bother. They're not proud of "how hard" they're working, that they're carrying multi-kilo rocks on their heads while they're still in their teens; they know exactly what they're missing out on, and what that lack means about the rest of their lives.
I'm naturally geared towards academic pathways. I genuinely enjoy learning, will read indepth reports and long non-fiction books for pleasure, and my workday 'soundtrack' is mostly YouTube documentaries. If I encounter a concept I'm unfamiliar with, a word I don't recognise, or a medical condition, language, or identity I've never heard of - I Google it. I know how to identify and compare/contrast reliable sources, and I know how to do background research on people presenting lived experience positions. I enjoy this. I genuinely enjoy studying and learning. That's a privileged position to be in; I'm not from a wealthy, middle-class family; my father was a factory worker, my mother's highest working role was as a carer. We were no-heating-no-carpets-house-under-threat-of-repossession-no-car broke twice in my childhood, and our 'normal' was closely watching the pennies, defaulting to sweaters and physical activity rather than switching on the heating, having to wait for the immersion to heat enough hot water for a shower (took about an hour), and then switching it off just before you went into the bathroom. It was walking 2miles to the nearest town. It was spending summers working, rather than going on holiday. It was going 'abroad' twice in my life (once to France, on a school trip, and once to Ireland, to visit family.) It was travelling a complex, exhausting bus-coach-train route to cross to the Isle of Wight as foot passengers, because, even when we did have a car, it was more expensive than all of that to take the car across on the ferry. It was choosing midnight ferry sailings, because they were cheaper. It was holidays in family member's homes, sleeping on the living room floor, or in a caravan - we stayed in a Travelodge once in my childhood.
My father taught me to value education, primarily because it's free in the UK, and books and other resources are free in libraries. Initially suspicious of the internet, he came to realise that, for the price of around one magazine a week, he could have access to unlimited information on anything he wanted to know about. He grew up in rural Ireland, and had to move to the UK at the age of 19, following the death of both his parents within 4 years, because there was no work that would enable him to support himself in Ireland at that time. He had to deal with anti-Irish racism, and did so by being "quite clever, really, aren't you?" - his natural intelligence made it impossible for any English employer talking to him to continue to believe that English attitude that "the Irish are all completely stupid and incompetent." My Dad had performed well in school, which offered proof that he wasn't "just talking a good game"; he could apply his obvious intelligence, too.
Likewise, my own academic achievements have seen people who were very vocal about the fact that they didn't like me, or were hesitant around my work experience background, give me a chance; without good exam results, I would have had even more doors slammed on me than I already have.
My academic success hasn't stopped multiple life blows taking me down in the 15yrs since I achieved my A-Levels. What is has done, however, is given me the skills to find information, insight, and support around the things that have happened, and are happening, to me. My academic success is the foundation of a very scrappy, very rough-and-ready, very messy, resilience. I don't "keep calm and carry on". I am not unruffled on the surface (or anywhere else.) I curse, spit, kick, and yell my way through the various roadblocks I've hit in the past decade and a half. And I've been able to do it because I know I can at least begin to answer the universal question "Why is this happening to me?!" because I'm good at academic stuff. That means that, once I've had my feelings, and begun to calm down, I can fall back on my academic abilities to begin to put things into perspective.
But what about kids who aren't academic? Are they supposed to just be told they failed?!
Of course not. But allowing people to have their feelings - their anger, their frustration, their disappointment, their fear, their shame - in response to things that actually do matter to them, in that moment, is not the same as "letting them believe they're failures."
Discovering that the hardest work you can offer doesn't always bring success is horrific. I've faced it about 5 times since leaving school, and it never gets any less enraging, despair-inducing, or frustrating. It's just that, because I was away from parental influences every time I encountered this reality, I was able to have all of my feelings, which has resulted in those feelings cycling through more rapidly each time. Which means that, each time, I get to "Okay, so that's the feelings done with - now how do we move forward?" a bit quicker.
Absolutely, there are jobs that are worthwhile, financially rewarding, and genuinely engaging that don't rely on academic achievement - but that's no reason not to instil a love of learning in their own way in children and young people.
Someone who comes to an understanding by moving their body around a lot, in weird and beautiful ways, is learning.
Someone who comes to an understanding by building complex scale models is learning.
Someone who comes to an understanding by drawing or painting is learning.
Someone who comes to an understanding by rapping, or blending an epic DJ set, is learning.
Learning is just the process of coming to an understanding of something new. And everyone has their own individual way of coming to understandings. Mine happens to be reading and researching. Someone else's may be breakdancing, skateboarding, surfing, graffiti painting, designing beautiful rooms, or going for a walk.
The goal is to become good, and relatively quick, at coming to understandings of new ideas.
How you do that doesn't really matter - but being able to at least attempt coming to understanding in an academic way is still necessary, because academic qualifications are an objective statement about your skills - for example, my results will show you that I'm better at communication and qualitative analysis than I am at quantitative analysis, and that I'm better at blending facts and figures with abstract concepts than I am at following processes. Those are two very important things for employers to know when deciding if I'm the right person for them to work with, and also things I can easily lie about if all those employers have is my 'gift of the gab.'
It's okay to let your teens have their feelings about their exam results.
It's okay for them to feel that not getting the grades they wanted actually does matter.
They're probably not going to be the next Richard Branson or Steven Bartlett - but Richard Branson and Steven Bartlett may have some good advice for them, and encouraging them to reach out to them on their own, in their own words, builds a key transferable skill. (Two, actually; effective communication, and stakeholder engagement, with the latter tapping into a third: persuasion.)
They haven't failed if they "end up in a minimum-wage job" - no job is a 'failure.' Most minimum wage jobs are actually the jobs that society relies on. Not everyone is going to be in the top income tax bracket; we already have a situation where there are over 500,000 more people unemployed than there actually are available vacancies - getting a job is a considerable achievement, especially a minimum wage job, which will attract a far higher number of applicants, as more people have the skills and backgrounds required than would be the case for a higher-paid role.
Self-employment is expensive. The amount of "network building" you have to do - unpaid - to get a brand going, especially if you don't have access to a large amount of capital, is far more than you will ever imagine. The number of times you have to remind the same people that you exist, and what you do, is exhaustingly frustrating. The amount of money you'll have to pay for licences, insurance, permits, premises, legal requirements, etc is eyewatering. The majority of start-up businesses go bankrupt within their first 5yrs. Most of those don't make it to the 3yr mark.
Succeeding at self-employment, or anything, really, without your own vehicle becomes even more difficult than succeeding to begin with. And in order to get a car, especially if you don't come from comfortably off parents, you need to have a job. Even if you're just buying a £500 second (or third, or fourth...or eighteenth...) hand runaround, that money has to come from somewhere, and, for most teenagers, the only person who's going to give you money is an employer. Even 'entry level', minimum wage jobs are increasingly expecting to see some evidence that you can sit down, shut up, do what you're told, remember what you're told, and respond to unpredictable prompts. The most reliable way to provide this evidence is in the form of decent exam grades.
Does education need to be more expansive and inclusive?
Absolutely. As we've discussed, people have different ways of learning, and, increasingly, businesses are needing different forms of intelligence than purely academic intelligence in order to grow and gain market share.
Schools....haven't really processed that the world has changed, and that therefore the expectations of the point of exam grades is very different. You're no longer looking, necessarily, to convey that you deserve to go and study law or medicine at a top University; instead, you're looking to convey that you're not going to be an HR nightmare, that you know how to vary your style, tone, and method of communication to different stakeholders, that you know how to get on with people you may not like, that you know how to have genuinely new ideas.
But what about people who are neurodivergent, or who have learning disabilities? Are you just accepting they should be written off?!
No. I'm about to upset a lot of adults by suggesting that you don't become a parent until you can realistically state that you are in a position to support your child for the entirety of your life, including putting in place support for after your death.
Disability, neurodivergence, cognitive impairment, etc can all mean that some of the people experiencing those barriers genuinely aren't ever able to manage remunerative employment. That they won't be able to afford to live 'independently', or support their parents when those parents enter older age.
Preparation for that potential reality follows one of three routes:
1. Marry well, and stay married to that person.
2. Start and grow a business which could comfortably and sincerely employ someone with intellectual disabilities, neurodivergence, and complex physical disabilities, so that, even if your disabled, cognitively impaired, or neurodivergent child is able to manage an employed job of their own, someone else who might struggle has another option.
3. Save into a trust fund before you even decide to have kids. And keep up the payments throughout your life.
And if you're thinking "Well, I'll just get testing, and terminate the pregnancy if my child has any of those problems" -
1. Not everything can be tested for.
2. Your completely able-bodied, highly cognitively capable, neurotypical child may have to abandon a successful career in order to escape domestic violence. They may lose their home to a disaster. They may be unable to afford to continue living 'independently' following the death or defection of a partner; they may need to come home, and would appreciate an easy-in employment option when they get there.
People do not ask to be born. We are all here because our parents made a choice which we couldn't be consulted on. We actually are owed an expectation that our parents can support us throughout their life, because we didn't get to choose who our parents were, the first 18-20yrs or so of our lives, we're very limited in what we can do to prepare and build for our own lives, we're often very hampered by circumstances we didn't choose, and can't alter.
That doesn't mean everyone should get to be a trust fund brat, drifting around while someone else pays the bills; taking responsibility and providing for yourself where you can helps build resilience and mental wellbeing, and achieving on your own merits and efforts is one of the best confidence boosts out there.
But we're not completely independent. All of us depend on each other to a certain extent. And that's okay.
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