4th September 2015 1:00
By Blue Tutors
This year’s GCSE results have recently been released, and with them has come the inevitable slew of human interest stories following students getting their results. Twins gaining spectacular and identical results, adults heading back to school to top up their education, 9 year old prodigies who sit GCSEs for fun, and students who achieve perfect results in a staggering number of subjects. The stories that emerge year on year are always varied and in every case impressive. Yet when viewed side by side, there is a trend which emerges which I believe should cause concern amongst teachers, tutors and parents.
The amount of pressure on students to take more subjects and achieve perfect results is growing exponentially. Not so long ago, GCSE tutors were almost always brought in by parents who were concerned that their children were behind in a particular core subject, and wanted to ensure that they achieved at least a ‘C’ grade, which has long been informally considered a passing grade. We’ve come a long way since then, and it is common place for students to have many tutors for different subjects, whether they feel they are really struggling or not. Now the goal is not C grade, but an A or A*, and not just in core subjects, but in a wide range of subjects, with some students studying up to twelve subjects instead of the usual eight or nine.
As a tutor it can be difficult to support a student taking an unnecessarily high volume of GCSEs. Unfortunately it is often the case that the student’s only problem is that they simply taken on too much work. Students often consider themselves to be less capable of achieving a high grade in a subject, but the problem could just as easily be that they just don’t have time to study the subject properly. Often under these circumstances the best thing a tutor can do is advise a student to take fewer subjects rather than help them struggle through an unnecessarily high volume of work. Where this isn’t possible, the best tutors can do is offer support, something which students are often in need of more than academic help.