At this time of the year, Rudyard Kipling’s words push their way into my data-crowded brain: 

“If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…”

Yes, that strain again - the results season - is now going into its dying fall and with it, no doubt, some schools will be losing their own heads and starting to cast about for quick and improbable promotions. 

Prematurely greying headteachers will be contemplating those downward trends and early retirement, and starting to explore those “exciting new opportunities” that the chair of governors, half-smiling, had alluded to before the end of last term. Tea chests and black bin liners sit on desks, waiting to be filled. Consultancy awaits. 

GCSE results day: ‘Triumph and disaster’

We learn at this time that Kipling was wrong: “triumph and disaster” are not imposters. No, they’re in the examinations office as special guests, with their feet up, Boris-style, helping themselves to the chocolate biscuits. They’re in every email, every conversation, and sometimes even the very same sentence (“Ooh, look! You got a 9 in history, but, ah, a 3 in maths...never mind”). In some schools, Mr Triumph and Ms Disaster are assistants to the HR officer, drilling down into the value-added results for every teacher. 

We are caught in a new talk state of mind, a doublethink internal dialogue with our own values, in which we have to simultaneously congratulate those for succeeding in something so important, but also reassure those who did not “make thoughts their aim” that exams, at the end of the day, when all is said and done, on balance, and when every other cliche is over the hill and done to death, should not define an individual. 

And, when your brain has been made barren by cliches laced with coffee, we quote (God help us) Jeremy Clarkson’s annual super-humblebrag. And we are ashamed. 

The new GCSE grading system

To some extent, this all feels a little unexpected this year. We were told that the new grade set for GCSE was going to replace the loose, old, flabby alphabet: it would be more sciency, less Englishy. It would be leaner and fitter, more taut than taught; a grade 9 would be harder to find than a comb in the Match of the Day Green Room. But it turns out to be more Andy Ruiz than Anthony Joshua. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

And no sooner are the results posted than the re-marks, those video-assisted referees of assessment, start to come in, pleading hand-ball, and for the mark to be disallowed (and upgraded).

Suddenly, it seems, whole families are fluent in the eduspeak of grade boundaries, moderation, raw marks and scaling. 

And just when you thought that the cacophony could not get any more intense, Twitter goes into narcissistic overdrive, with hyperselective schools hugging themselves on obtaining 112 per cent A*s and 9s. Meanwhile, those who were deselected look away. 

Drowning in results data

The patterns formed on two kaleidoscopic Thursdays in August go on to shape the structure of the new academic year.

It is inevitable, and partly right, that they do so, because so many resources have gone into getting these results. And results matter. But distortions are easy to interpret as meaningful, coherent, self-evident truths, and this is especially true now that we have so much data available. 

Schools increasingly live on a diet of line and scatter graphs and value-added charts, and although these have to form the basis for evaluating progress, they should not be the only measures applied. 

As the professionals who run schools, we have to cultivate the values that we want to retain and promote, not only to our pupils, but also to each other. That means that such qualities as imagination, empathy, creativity - and even human frailty - contribute to our reading of this annual unfolding, imperfect narrative.

Balancing the utilitarian and the intuitive

We have to achieve a balance between the utilitarian and the intuitive. And in doing so we all have to deepen our vocabulary so that we do not (consciously or unconsciously) attach innate worth to reductive, pseudoscientific nomenclature. There should be no hierarchies of subjects within schools, and nor should the language we “employ”, or the “processes” used, create them. 

Is it surprising that we are increasingly seeing arts subjects decline, and once-dominant A-level subjects such as English lose students to subjects that are perceived to have more usefulness in this materialistic, impatient, age? 

Such changes do not happen for one reason alone, and most students do not think that maths will guarantee them a well-paid job. But nor are they deaf to the multiple and subtle messages they are exposed to during the working week.

The conversations we have with each other, with parents and with students should be at this time - and also throughout the coming academic year - expansive and open-ended, equally valuing measurable achievement alongside intangible growth. 

David James is deputy head (academic) of Bryanston School, an independent school in Dorset