8th January 2021 14:59
By Blue Tutors
It wasn’t so long ago that we wrote an article on the difficulties facing students this academic year following the lockdown in March and time out of the classroom. We were concerned that no GCSE and A Level exams in June meant no drive to understand the work as well as students normally would; something particularly worrying for students whose pattern of work is to cram in the last few weeks leading up to the exams.
The latest government announcement is that this year’s exams have been cancelled as well and that students won’t be returning to school until mid February at the earliest.
Let’s get the politics out of the way first. The whole situation has been handled badly, and in an effort to strike a balance between keeping our economy afloat and protect lives, the government has achieved neither. Yes, the situation is something not experienced for over a century and there have been many unforeseeable setbacks, but all the more reason to be overly cautious from day 1 and refuse to relax restrictions until the daily cases of Covid were virtually 0. Many other countries have been far less affected.
The uncertainty created as a result of see-sawing between the level of restriction has had an impact on everyone in the country, and none more so than students at school and university. Many A Level and University students have been very vocal about their disgruntlement, presumably because it’s often from that age that young people start to think more carefully about their future and the difference a first class education can have. As the current generation of younger students grow up we’re going to hear much more about how this time away from the classroom has set them back.
A worrying sign for us is that the announcement to close schools has coincided with a huge demand for tutors, but the subsequent cancellation of exams meant a much more significant drop off in tuition as parents decided that, without the exams, there was no point. We are aware that many students begin tutoring with the end goal of doing well in their exams, but we have always reassured ourselves that those lessons do more than just prepare someone for an exam, also preparing them for the future. In fact, we ask all of our tutors to focus on developing understanding so that students genuinely learn, rather than just learning the tricks to pass an exam.
Ofqual will determine how to “grade” pupils in the absence of exams, and hopefully they will do a good job, but there is far too much emphasis on how to test students, rather making sure that they continue to learn over the next few months. Again, it will be the exam crammers who suffer most, the last minute learners who use an impending exam as the motivation to work.
It is a vitally important few months for every student in the country, and we need to make sure that students don’t start school in September this year essentially 18 months behind many of their peers. Without the drive of exams students will need something to motivate them, which to a large extent will fall on parents, and while that probably isn’t fair, it will make a huge difference if students are pushed to learn over the next few months.