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Results Day

Colin Campbell
by Colin Campbell on 29/08/18 18:00
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For us, for team Campbell, the first results day was last Thursday when Grace received her GSCE’s.

The combination of a lifetime (lifetimes so far) of conventional education comes down to a slip of paper received at 9:30 on a Thursday morning.

Grace took herself to school to collect them, it was always going to be that way for her. She texted a photograph of her results to me and her Mum on receipt.

Grace did great, she was really pleased with the results that she received which she thought reflected what she had put in to the process. They will allow her to move onto the things that she wants to do next; I guess that is the point of this.

I’m a governor at the school where Grace received her results, and was a governor at her Primary School for most of the time she was there too and so I have been able to watch education from the inside but as someone not trained in education.

To my mind the system us fundamentally floored, but I’m not able here to offer you an alternative solution to the problems that seem to exist.

The most fundamental problem though is the lack of inspiration the children receive in the subjects that they choose to learn.

If you take Grace as an example, in year 3 and 4 her best subject was English. She was inspired by a fantastic woman who is now the Head Teacher of her Primary School, to explore, love and understand books, stories and writing which surrounds that subject.

From that time on, Grace has been systematically let down by English education (to my mind at least). She is now done with English, she never has to look at it again.

It seems, from my experience as a governor and talking to other people in education, that this is a trend with English, as children over analyse to the death classic texts with no fun, inspiration or enjoyment. Simply going through a process that ticks a box that says they’re ‘clever’ that gives them a line on a piece of paper that allows them to move to the next thing.

That is what results day is. It’s collecting a widget to move on to the next part of the widget line.

I completely understand that there has to be a scoring system somewhere. People have to be graded and marked, but does that have to be done by grinding out the spirit, enjoyment and inspiration?

Grace chose to dump English at A-Level for History instead, as seems to be the trend for people in her situation now. The numbers entering History seem to show that.

That is because English used to be about stories. It used to be about reading stories and analysing what the Author meant, talking to people about it and writing it down. Now it’s not that, now it’s about in-depth infinitesimal analysis of paragraphs, single words or punctuation.

It’s rubbish.

I am reminded of the foreward of Lord of the Rings where J.R.R Token is at pains to stress that Lord of the Rings is just a story and it’s not a comparison of the second world war or anything similar.

We seem to have lost the joy of stories, as we lost the joy of Science, Art and Music.

The greatest subjects have been pushed down the line, counting less and meaning less in applications to Universities for all but the very few. It’s funny though, because one of Grace’s GCSE choices was Music. I think it’s fair and perhaps polite to say that the teaching was ‘somewhat unconventional’.

This subject involved a trip to Germany with an orchestra with hilarious consequences. The trip created some fantastic stories, things that were done and what occurred which were totally not Music related but were certainly teenage related.

It seems that the Music class did really well at GCSE with many of them achieving the top grade available even though a lot of the time they were left to their own devices to learn, play and discover. 

Fancy that, imagine the situation where you gave somebody something that they love and the resources to learn about it, and they did it!

What are the chances of that happening?

The final thing about results day though is that it’s important to remember that every bodies bar at results day sits in a different place.

Grace didn’t do so well in comparison to the two people in her year who got 10 grade 9’s at GCSE (a grade 9 is beyond A*). However, Grace did really well when compared to some of her friends who managed to get 4 GCSE’s. Each bar is set differently, and for all those guys, they smashed the bar. They got what they needed and got to go where they’re going next.

For some people results day is an opportunity to humble brag and add to the ‘keeping up with the Jones’’ lifestyle that they choose to live. For others, it’s just a pit stop. A chance to see where things are, to move forwards if that’s possible or to fix things if it’s not, and then to move again.

 

Blog post number: 1749

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Colin Campbell
Written by Colin Campbell
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