Yesterday, the mask slipped. When the first minister asserted that “it is our firm intention, as things stand right now, that next year’s exam diet will go ahead”, she revealed that her government places a higher value on examinations than it does on young people’s mental health.
It matters little that she went on to say this: “We will also be considering carefully how we work to address and mitigate and make up over time any impact of this crisis period on young people’s learning.” Because the two statements are diametrically opposed: you cannot mitigate the impact of Covid-19 on learners in S4-6 and insist they sit exams, because exams will only exacerbate those learners’ difficulties.
How do I know this? Because in 13 years as a principal teacher, I’ve seen the damage the exam system does to young people’s mental health, even in “normal” circumstances.
Background: Year of blended learning ‘absolutely not’ the plan
Opinion: ‘Exams are fundamentally flawed - so let’s try this’
Coronavirus: ‘Use school closures to reset our exam system’
A student’s view: ‘Children must be freed from the curriculum’s chokehold’
Secondary teachers know that something truly disturbing starts to happen to our teenagers about halfway through S4, and is then repeated and heightened at the same point in S5. Just at the point in their education when joy in learning, curiosity and making connections between subjects and concepts should be at their height, they feel the blunt force of the exam regime, and symptoms of anxiety disorders spike.
The impact of exam pressure on students’ mental health
Some young people take flight - they play truant or take drugs or miss deadline after deadline or go off sick, plagued by mental ill-health that manifests in a range of physical symptoms. Others go to the opposite extreme, obsessing over every bit of feedback, demanding more timed practices, risking burnout. The majority grow dull-eyed and listless, numbed by lesson after lesson focused on superficial learning and how to squeeze more marks out of the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) through formulaic manoeuvrings.
This has the hallmarks of a kind of senior phase traumatic stress disorder, and it’s certainly not what rich learning for the 21st century should look and feel like.
Even if full-time classes could start again in August, has the first minister even begun to imagine how adding the impact of Covid-19 and the lockdown to all of this will start to affect our young people’s wellbeing in the months to come? If there is one cohort of students who deserve to be asked if they want a break from exams, it’s this one.
After all, in some parts of it, our system places a lot of emphasis on the pupil voice - so isn’t it time we asked our young people about their experience of the past three months and, more generally, of the exam system and its effects on their wellbeing, and what reforms they would like to see?
Why do we allow Scotland’s obsession with exams to dominate their school lives in the senior phase, to have such an impact on their present wellbeing and future prospects, without any accountability to them, without them having any opportunity to question that culture or transform it?
That kind of consultation should start right now with questions about the 2021 exam diet: both the first minister and the SQA should give far more consideration to pupils’ mental health during the coronavirus pandemic. They should certainly give more consideration to what teachers are telling them just now about the folly and impracticality of holding exams in 2021.
When we do finally escape the clutches of Covid-19, Scottish education cannot be allowed to return to “normal”. There is no normal to return to. There never was: any education system with the levels of pupil stress that Scotland suffers has to be considered abnormal. Teacher stress? I’ll leave that for another day.
Quite simply, learning shouldn’t be full of anxiety, and it shouldn’t be focused exclusively on the narrow range of skills measured by formal exams. It should instead have health and wellbeing at its core. That means putting more control in pupils’ and teachers’ hands, asking them what they want the qualifications system to look like - and listening to them.
The first minister had the chance yesterday to start asking those kinds of questions, to show that kind of leadership, to move us in that new direction.
She blew it.
Allan Crosbie is a principal teacher of English in Edinburgh
Some resources for understanding pupil health and wellbeing:
