You’ve heard about us. The year that had their exams cancelled. The year that’s going to get their grades…without having sat the actual exam. 

We may physically be in August, but some of us are still emotionally processing March.

There was something different in the air in March. Some unmistakable tension, palpable fear, which was amplified by the mere sound of a cough. Coronavirus took over the hysteria of TikTok. “Waves” were a term no longer designated to physics but rather to real life. 

Worn-down after rigorous GCSEs, months of agonising over coursework and Ucas, the fact that we weren’t failing at the final hurdle - we didn’t even reach it - was the definition of anticlimactic.

For months, I’d convinced myself: “Don’t think of anything but A levels. Don’t think of anything but Renaissance poetry and coefficients of restitution and Gatsby and verbs. Within two days, my learning was rendered useless. 

A-level exams hit by the coronavirus

I have lost count of the days I spent staring at walls covered in sticky notes of formulae that no longer matter. Lessons now seem like a foreign concept.

But school can be more than the academic grind. It’s the structure and interaction and routine and little moments of laughter in lessons that make your day brighter. It’s the teachers - teachers who are heroes, without the gaslighting rhetoric of “making sacrifices”. It’s the fleeting moments of connection, the “good morning”, the smile from support staff. 

All that has since been replaced with fractured conversation, with faces on results day no longer as familiar and comforting as they once were.  

Of course, there are more pressing problems in the world than some Year 13s struggling. A doctor on an ICU ward is focused on helping a patient with Covid-19 to breathe, a teacher is busy trying to accommodate other students and rank Year 13s. 

With true stoicism, many basked in the idea of the longest summer of their educational lives, the lie-ins, the freedom. But for some like myself, everything was suddenly more difficult. 

There was no one. No one to turn to, no one to ask for help, because there was no work to be done. No one to smile at, no escape from arguments. Everything felt more intense. The rites of passage of prom and leaving assemblies faded into insignificance as the loss became intangible - the loss of exams and work reflected a loss of purpose and opportunity.

As children around the country were swept up in remote learning, I succumbed to endlessly scrolling through the news, feeling lost, alone and completely abandoned. 

Suffocating dread

“Exam shambles”. “Shattered dreams”. These headlines are compounding feelings of what I can only describe as suffocating dread, as the chaos of the SQA results begins to unravel. 

Instinctively, I know the same will occur on A-level results day. Far from a day of celebration and new beginnings, results day this year will be rushed, tense, and fraught with relentless uncertainty. 

Scroll to the comments of sensationalist articles on results day, and you’ll meet the essential, “It’s not the end of the world”. On one occasion, I even came across somebody proposing a conspiracy theory - because, you see, we definitely created the coronavirus to avoid sitting exams. Snowflakes, aren’t we?

I know there are autumn exams. But the idea of students being able to gather both the mental and physical energy to sit a full exam after six months of no formal teaching and an unfinished course is unreal. 

After five months, there is nothing left to do except flick through incomplete notes and absorb an unhealthy amount of news. The lack of communication from Ofqual is staggering.

At this point, we’re tired, we don’t know what’s going to happen. Students can choose to use their mock grades. Headline after headline after headline. “Pick and mix your results!” “Three A levels for the price of one!” 

I feel stupid, confused and lost. Would I trust these results? Not with a bargepole. It’s degrading and insulting to be awarded the same grade as someone who may have cheated in a mock.

The pain of feeling directionless still comes in waves. We don’t heal wounds by pretending they don’t exist. The lack of closure, especially this year, knows no bounds. 

We were forgotten, simply dropped, left hanging on to the idea of university as a new beginning, which is now tainted by the prospect of a second wave and an innumerable number of rules and regulations. 

We are just another cohort, as a new school year comes closer. For all the times we’ve been labelled “the lost generation”, for all the times the future and the green light has felt out of reach, for all the times progression has felt like an illusion, it seems that there is only one way this story can end. 

Kimi Chaddah is a Year 13 student at a secondary school in the North West