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‘We need to stop pretending every child is the same whatever their background and that we can achieve the same outcomes at the same time.’ Photograph: David Davies/PA
‘We need to stop pretending every child is the same whatever their background and that we can achieve the same outcomes at the same time.’ Photograph: David Davies/PA

Secret headteacher: ‘After Thursday’s GCSE results, will I still have a job?’

This article is more than 7 years old

This year I’ve no idea what my students will get in their GCSE exams. I am sick with worry and I fear for the future

Twenty-five years ago, when I started out as an English teacher, I was pretty much always spot on estimating my students’ exam results. I had no experience but I had good colleagues and some tatty past papers. All I had to do was check what the kids could do unaided, remedy any mistakes they were making and guide them through. I was working in a big urban comprehensive. There wasn’t much homework going on and I’d been in the middle of more than one lesson when the police had arrived to have a chat with someone. The kids were always there for their exams though. And they got what I expected.

Now I’m a headteacher. And this year I have absolutely no idea what my students will get in their GCSEs – neither as a teacher of a GCSE class nor the head of 180 children in that year. We have done four sets of mocks, compulsory after-school revision sessions, Easter school, Saturday school, parents’ revision evenings, and afternoons and mornings. There simply is nothing more my staff could have done – they have put on brilliant lessons, great teaching, lots of feedback, precision analysis.

But we still haven’t got a clue because of changes to grade boundaries made at whim, structural changes to questions and papers, and some frankly ridiculous questions this year – which initiated a ton of amusing memes. Then there are serious concerns about the quality of markers, many of whom are inexperienced or overworked, or both. I had a recent case in which a former member of staff with a grudge was appointed as a moderator to my school. Is it any surprise if headteachers are terrified?

Last year we were side-swiped by IGCSE English marking that essentially contradicted everything we’d been told. The GCSE maths C/D boundary was moved by eight marks. It was so obvious (but as an examiner you can’t go on the record) that even independent schools spoke out.

One of my good friends was sacked from his position of headteacher in a large academy chain after only two years. His results were better than mine and the gap between his estimates and the reality was smaller – but the gap suggested to his academy chain bosses that he didn’t know what he was doing. He has three children, is brilliant, and hasn’t secured a permanent job since.

I’m lucky – I have very supportive bosses, they understand the context of disadvantage in our school and they appreciate that building real change takes time and patience. But with a bad set of results, I will come under the watchful eye of our regional schools commissioner, local authority, the Department for Education and Ofsted. Successive poor results would rock my self-confidence – I worry most about losing the trust of my bosses, my senior team and the teachers who bust a gut every day.

I don’t know what results we’re going to get but I know we won’t be near the top of the league tables. Our children start year 7 well below expected standards (I expect they started primary school well below expected standards too) and things just get tougher for them. More than 40% of them are on our special needs register, 60% receive free school meals, 20% live in a home where none of the adults has ever worked and 12% have an attendance to school of 25% or less. If I use Fisher Family Trust data, the most commonly used tool for predicting likely outcomes based on starting points, it says this cohort of year 11 will get 26%-32% A*-C including English and maths. Our aspirations for them are much higher than this. Naturally, I’m hoping to hit the floor target (40%).

But I have little faith in the system now. I’ve been suffering from anxiety since October. I’ve been lying awake in the small hours trying to figure out what else we could do. When I wake up it is often the first thing I think about. My stress-related psoriasis and irritable bowel syndrome have never been worse and I’ve had more migraines in the past 12 months than in the past 10 years.

My blood pressure shot up so high just before Christmas that it wasn’t on any of the charts, and I thought the doctor was going to handcuff me to his chair to stop me going into work. And that’s just the physical effects; it does not include the damage to my marriage, and the relationship I have with my children or other friends and family. My mum asked me if I just couldn’t get a job at one of those “normal quiet schools”. I’m not sure they exist any more.

When I meet up with local colleagues, some of them are looking pretty awful and are full of tales of woe. My Twitter colleagues who are heads are dropping off my timeline. Not only are we all facing uncertainty about exams, we’re juggling this with reduced budgets, redundancies, trying to recruit when there are genuine problems out there – compounded in some geographical areas – and that’s on top of the basic day job.

We need to get back to a time when if a student demonstrated they knew specific content or showed specific skills, they were rewarded for it. It should not matter where they stand in a rank order. We need to stop changing marking guidance mid-year and provide decent exemplar work for schools to refer to.

The move towards Progress 8, the new accountability measure intended to judge schools on progress made by students, is a positive move forward. But I know that the press will still be reporting five A*-Cs including English and maths, and the first unvalidated league tables will use this measure. I know what the banners outside schools and on websites will be. Even if we have a brilliant year, we won’t compare well – and this is the only information parents will refer to when choosing their September 2017 schools.

We need to stop pretending every child is the same whatever their background and that we can achieve the same outcomes at the same time. Just like drivers, sometimes kids need more than one go at a test. I did not achieve my grade C in maths at 16 and I certainly don’t have an Ebacc. I also didn’t take eight level 2 qualifications at 16 either, so I personally wouldn’t show in the Progress 8 measures. Some children will never attain grade Cs in maths and English, no matter how many times they try. This should not make them or their schools failures.

There has been an unprecedented clampdown on “gaming” – when schools did everything they could to improve headline figures. But I’d say this went too far. Some of the alternative qualifications were genuinely better for some kids and it’s not fair on others not to allow retakes. Coursework was a good preparation for university, too. These were sacrificed for the sake of the headline A*-C scores and in schools like mine that is bad for the students. There is an obsession by already-advantaged parents with the league tables and with the schools at the top of them. Comprehensive education is becoming far less comprehensive in some areas of the country.

It doesn’t really matter that I’d like a fairer system for the children and also for the teachers. When midnight on Wednesday ticks around, I’ll be doing the middle of the night download and figuring out whether I will still have a job.

More on this story

More on this story

  • Record north-south gap in top GCSE grades blamed on ‘London-centric policies’

  • GCSE results show us a nation of overwhelmed, vulnerable children. Where is the support?

  • Exams, grammar schools, and the trouble with sorting the sheep from the goats

  • ‘Smashed it’: GCSE results bring surprise smiles for post-pandemic year group

  • Got a good argument in favour of grammar schools? Bring it on …

  • GCSE results show return to pre-Covid levels but also widening inequalities

  • Anger at ‘Hunger Games’ battle for pupils as pioneering school closes

  • Gender gap shrinks and regional gap widens: 2023’s key GCSE trends in England

  • GCSE results day 2023: higher fall in proportion of top grades in England than in other UK nations – as it happened

  • GCSE results fall in England after anti-grade inflation plans forced through

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