This GCSE results day, perhaps more than any other, we need to do two things. First, we need to pass on some congratulations.

Then, once and for all, we need to acknowledge that, frankly, we can’t go on like this.

First, the congratulations. As Ofqual rightly point outs, this year has seen the implementation of the biggest examination change in a generation. Last year, reformed GCSEs in English language, literature and maths gave us a taster. Today, we’ve seen 20 new qualifications with a new grading system come into play.

All credit to the examination regulator and the exam boards in handling this incredibly complex set of changes smoothly. All credit to the students, teachers, schools and colleges who weathered the storm of reform and who sat and taught these GCSEs.

Teachers ‘have weathered the storm’

Today’s results are stable overall. This may make for a boring headline but it is reassuring in the midst of all this change.

All things being equal, students sitting this set of exams will have achieved grades roughly equivalent to their predecessors of similar ability who sat the old GCSEs - notwithstanding the fact that the two grade scales don’t exactly match. Furthermore, they will not be disadvantaged by going first in unfamiliar qualifications. The system of “comparable outcomes” means similar cohorts will achieve similar grades.

You may, of course, wonder about the purpose of all of this reform when grades end up being roughly the same. It’s a reasonable point. But we can at least be reassured that our students, the people who matter most in all of this, are not being disadvantaged in terms of grades.

‘More stress and anxiety for students’

Whether they have been disadvantaged in other ways, however, is another matter. These reformed exams are harder than their predecessors, they contain more content and more papers, and the bar for the top grade 9 has been raised deliberately higher. Furthermore, the grading scale and new exams are unfamiliar and these are the first students to take them and the first teachers to teach them. In anybody’s book this is a stressful situation, and so it has proved, with many school leaders reporting that the pressure of these reformed exams has caused greater levels of stress and anxiety among their students.

Exams have always been stressful, of course, by their nature, and it is right that they should be challenging. But it is question of degree, and many of us wonder whether all the additional stress of this year’s exams - not to mention the time and cost that has gone into implementing a new system - is worth so much pain.

I wrote last week on a similar theme, questioning what the government set out to achieve in its reforms to the qualification system and concluding that the answer was not clear. And this question is perhaps particularly pertinent to GCSEs. Because exams taken at this age are the product of a bygone era in which large numbers of young people left school at 16. They were an end-point in themselves, the conclusion of schooling. That is no longer the case as the “age of participation” - which means education or some form of training - is now 18.

GCSEs are a stepping stone to the next phase, a way of guiding young people into subject choices, sixth forms, colleges and apprenticeships. So why is it necessary to make them so high-stakes; to put young people under such pressure; and to make them the performance measure by which we judge schools? It is surely an anachronism.

Do we need GCSEs at all?

So do we actually need GCSEs at all? Or would it be better to perhaps have a lighter touch form of assessment to help guide young people towards the subjects they most enjoy and that best suit them in the qualifications they take at 18? Would such a system help us to preserve curriculum breadth and avoid the narrowing straitjacket of fierce accountability measures? Would it better help young people of all abilities?

I am aware that this is not the time for further reform. We desperately need a period of stability to alleviate the workload pressures on staff, and to allow the changes that have taken place to bed in.

But that also gives us an ideal opportunity to spend some time planning for the future, for the government to work alongside the education sector in thinking about a new, more humane, more appropriate approach for the age we actually live in.

I am also aware that suggesting the scrapping of GCSEs - particularly on results day - may be seen as committing some sort of heresy. But, equally, as I said at the outset, we cannot go on like this. Our national addiction to high-stakes exams at 16 is past its sell-by-date. It needs to end.

Geoff Barton is general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders