As a newly qualified teacher in a core subject, it can be quite daunting taking on a GCSE class. I’ve seen one Year 11 group go through the motions and now, as I prepare to take my first Year 11 class, I'm wondering how to balance some healthy exam pressure with their wellbeing and mental health needs.
In a school where less than 20 per cent of students achieve the benchmark grade 5 in English and maths, we are throwing everything we have at our GCSE students: interventions, morning sessions, holiday sessions, extra homework, workshops, you name it. Half of our Year 11 teaching team are on the senior leadership team, the others are leading the department, and then there's me, an NQT. The pressure is on to get my set the grades they deserve.
Over my training year I have got to know my pupils, their lives and backgrounds, the good, the bad and the ugly. In an inner-city school in which more than four-in-five students are on free school meals, I have had more than my fair share of interesting, shocking and soul-destroying experiences with this class.
With parents or siblings behind bars, one student being taken into care, another being arrested and one breaking down after a lesson, afraid to walk down the street following a gang dispute, the last thing my pupils have on their minds is the podcast I thought they might enjoy on romanticism.
I know some of the pupils suffer from stress-induced anxiety, and the physical and mental scarring that comes with that. Through these struggles, we have built great relationships, but I have seen how they can buckle under the tiniest bit of pressure.
Goals seem out of reach
As a Teach First teacher, this is what I signed up for. I knew I would be working in a challenging school – and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I know that simply being there every day makes a difference to my pupils. When I took the class in Year 10, they told me that they had had more than 10 teachers throughout their school journey so far. This wasn't something they were proud of; so many adults coming in and out of their already unstable lives was upsetting for them. Being an unfaltering adult in their lives and giving them consistency always felt like enough. But as they enter Year 11, the need to get good results is an added pressure – one that I’m not entirely sure how I and my students are going to handle.
As practitioners, we know that success depends on high expectations, but I’ve seen both teachers and pupils stumble at the first hurdle – I saw one teacher declare that everyone in the class was going to get a grade 5. The pressure of this expectation on both pupils and the teacher was all-encompassing.
For many of our pupils, long-term goals seem so far out of reach that they would rather not even start trying; after all, if you don’t try hard, you can’t let yourself down, right? The interventions, assessments, continual feedback and data tracking don’t seem to be making much of a difference. Pupils in the school live from assessment to assessment, convinced that every grade they get under a 5 is a ratification of their failure and an indication of what is to come.
In my classroom, I try to shield my pupils from the bureaucracy when I can. My class don’t have grade stickers on their folders, for example, which students across the school see as a badge of failure. Every single lesson I start by celebrating student work from the previous lesson, to show them what my expectations are and celebrate some of their fantastic efforts.
Too many of them have given up, their minds preoccupied with surviving beyond the confines of my classroom and in the world outside. I’ve tried to enthuse them with a love of the subject and motivate them with engaging lessons, but for so many of them, they feel like it is too little, too late. I know it is my job to keep pushing them and support them to the best of my ability, but I’m finding it hard to find that line. How much pressure is too much?
The writer is a NQT in London
