It has been a GCSE results day like no other. In colleges across the country, post-16 students have received their GCSE results - many of them remotely, without ever coming near campus. 

Nationally, 33 per cent of resit students received at least a grade 4 in maths and 41 per cent achieved at least a grade 4 in English.

And while students may have picked up GCSE results today, yesterday afternoon, exam board Pearson wrote to colleges and schools to ask them to not publish level 1 and 2 BTEC results as they were to be reviewed. Pearson has not yet confirmed when final results will be published. 

We caught up with teachers and leaders to find out how they, and their students, feel about the day.

Gill Burbridge, principal of Leyton Sixth Form College

Principal Gill Burbridge tells Tes that while the GCSE results at her college were higher than last year, there have been some anomalies. One student, she explains, received a grade 7, despite her centre-assessed grade being a grade 4. 

“This is so damaging because it’s not just damaging to individual students and the distress it’s causing them and their families, it’s also damaging in terms of the credibility of awarding bodies and exam results. It’s exposing some of the flaws in a data-driven system which it’s a bit like The Wizard of Oz, you open the doors and you see what’s behind it and it does feel we’re on quite shaky territory,” she says. 

“It’s not just a lack of competence in the government’s capacity to handle this, it’s actually now a broader distrust of the results, what they mean and how they’ve been generated. I think that potentially is hugely damaging.”

Several students at Leyton Sixth Form College study level 1 and level 2 BTECs - and the decision by Pearson to tell schools and colleges yesterday afternoon not to publish those results saw staff “scrambling” to regenerate results, sort messaging, and update social media.

“I had students contacting us and turning up to college because they were so confused about what was happening. Having to explain to them and having them say, ‘Well when will we get the results, and how will we get them and what does that mean, does that mean I can’t progress to level 3?’ - it’s really unhelpful to have that last-minute messaging and decision making,” she says. 

“It’s another example of how our confidence in awarding bodies and in the system of generating results has been trampled on even further. The more uncertainty, the more anxiety is caused, the greater the loss of confidence.”

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Rebecca Atherfold, full-time maths tutor teaching functional skills and GCSE at the Learning and Enterprise College Bexley

At the Learning and Enterprise College Bexley, 66 per cent of students achieved a high grade in GCSE maths, and 59 per cent achieved that in GCSE English. 

Maths tutor Rebecca Atherfold tells Tes that after the build-up, she is pleased students now know their results and can move on. And for the students who did not achieve that grade 4, decisions can be made.

“The choices are to either retake the exam in the autumn term - which is a little bit risky because we didn’t finish the course, we stopped at the end of March - or the other option is to re-enrol and take the year again. A big part of what I’m doing today is talking to students about what their options are and going through it with them so that they can make the right decision,” she says.

For those who did achieve their grade 4 in Maths and English - after what may often have been their third or fourth attempt - that success will make such a difference to their lives, Atherfold adds.

“There are some students who have got conditional places for teacher training courses, access to midwifery nursing courses, or they needed the grades to get the Social Work qualification so just getting that GCSE maths in English makes a huge difference,” she says. 

She tells Tes that teacher-student relationships are “hugely important”, and that to continue to foster good relationships with students who may not have achieved a grade 4 this year, transparency about the grading process is key. 

Grant Glendinning, executive principal at NCG 

Executive principal Grant Glendinning spent the morning at Carlisle College watching GCSE resit students opening their results. The process went smoothly, he says, and grades in both subjects were an improvement on last year.

“There was quite an air of optimism, because you know [staff] realised that the grading that they’d delivered on behalf of the students was going to be honoured. We were hoping that students were going to get the kind of results that their hard work deserved really, and by and large, that’s been the case across the group. What we found is the results that we received back to distribute largely reflected the centre assessed grades. And, if anything, they were maybe slightly more buoyant, which is good news and it’s great for students,” he says.

He adds that NCG hopes to make use of the National Tutoring Fund to support those students who didn’t achieve that grade 4 this summer. Some students, he says, will be able to resit in the autumn, but others will need more long-term, sustained support.

“There are some students who know that they probably narrowly missed out with the work they did last year, and obviously, there may have been other factors which got in the way of what they could have potentially achieved. I think they’re really good candidates to consider the autumn resit. We hope we will be able to make use of some of the new tutoring funds that we’ve been allocated as part of this catch-up initiative. We’re going to try and form some groupings of students who were in that particular situation so we can get them over the line as soon as we can,” he says. 

“And for those who need some more work at this, we can provide more support and guidance throughout the year, certainly. We’ll be looking to offer them that retake in summer as we as we are obliged to. We will make sure that the interventions and support that we give are tailored and as useful as possible for students in that category. To be honest, where you’ve had a fail experience a number of times consistently, it’s time to consider different approaches.”

As at most colleges, there are a number of students at NCG awaiting BTEC results. Mr Glendinning hopes these will be published as soon as possible. 

Jonny Kay, head of English and maths at Tyne Coast College  

Head of English and maths Jonny Kay tells Tes that there is a “sense of relief” around the college.

“Staff are feeling relieved just because of all the changes that have happened, all the changes to policy, some of the latest news that we’ve received over the last few months, it’s been difficult to deal with at times. We’re just feeling relief, and happiness for a lot of students. We will sort out the students who are disappointed, as we always do,” he says. 

He says that students have a lot of questions for staff - not just about their GCSE results, but about college life going forward. Many want to know what delivery will look like; if it will be a mixture of online and onsite learning. He says it was really helpful to have staff on hand to answer students’ queries. 

He adds that more information is needed from the government with regards to the autumn exam series. He says that there’s still a lot of confusion among schools and colleges around who needs to resit. 

“We are all hoping that there will be clarification, the government have said ‘you’ll get the opportunity to resit’, but a lot of places, schools included, will be thinking ‘does that mean that it’s mandatory that we have to put students into resit?’ If a student is coming in with a grade 1 or 2, it might not be appropriate for them to resit in November since they’ve had such a long break since March,” he says. 

“We’ve asked students who didn’t achieve the grade, ‘would you be interested in it’ so we can build a picture of what numbers actually look like before we get any additional guidance. There’s the logistics as well. Where do students go? At some of the bigger colleges where you have 4,000 or 5,000 students, if you’ve got 1,000 students in, distanced by two metres in every direction, you will have to close that college. We need more information from the government, but we’ll be prepared as we always are.”