I watch results day with two hats, or maybe three! As the principal and teacher at an international school in Singapore, I see it from the exam room, the staffroom, the anxious corridor outside the office where the envelopes are handed out. As the mother of teenage boys, I see it from the dining room table, where the real conversation happens each evening once school is behind them. Those two hats give me the same view: this is not a day that is serving our young people well, and it's time we admitted it.
I have a third vantage point too. I was part of the very first cohort to sit GCSEs in the UK, back when the qualification itself was brand new. I remember what it felt like to be the guinea pigs, and I remember, just as clearly, opening my own envelope and finding that C in Chemistry sitting among the results. Nearly forty years on, I have lived in Singapore for the last decade, in a culture that knows academic pressure better than most places on earth. I have watched families here move heaven and earth for a grade, and I've watched what that pressure does to a teenager's sense of self when the grade doesn't arrive. It has taught me, more than anything else, that the loudest thing we say to young people on results day should not be about the number on the page.
Every August, the same headlines roll out. Photos of ecstatic teenagers leaping in the air, fists full of envelopes. Local papers proudly listing every 9, every 8, every "top grade." National coverage fixates on the same handful of high-achievers, the same handful of schools, the same narrow story about what success looks like.
I want to tell you about the grade I am proudest of. It's not a 9. It's not even close. It's a C in Chemistry.
That C represents more effort than any top grade I've seen a student walk away with. It represents late nights that didn't come naturally, many tears, high levels of anxiety, a subject that fought me every step of the way, and the quiet, unglamorous decision to keep going anyway. Nobody wrote a headline about it. Nobody needed to. It mattered because I knew how hard I worked to get there.
That's the story results day should be telling. Instead, we've built a culture around it that measures a young person's worth in single digits, and we wonder why so many of them arrive at that envelope already convinced they've failed before they've opened it.
We are asking the wrong question
The question every August shouldn't be "how many 9s did we get?" It should be "how are our young people doing?" Those are not the same question, and treating them as if they are is doing real damage.
We publish grade distributions with total confidence and total precision, the UK league tables published in the Times of London, and all over Social Media, make it even more stressful for our young people and school leaders, all of whom just want what is best for our teenagers: happy students with a healthy mental wellbeing.
We do not publish, with anything like the same energy, the numbers that would actually tell us whether results day is a success. What if, alongside the league tables, we published figures like these instead:
Wellbeing is not the soft option
There's a tendency to treat wellbeing as the nice-to-have, the thing we get to once the "real" business of grades is sorted. That's backwards. A young person who leaves school believing their value is tied to a number on a certificate is not being set up for success, they're being set up for a lifetime of measuring themselves against an impossible standard.
Celebrating the 9s isn't the problem. Those students worked hard too, and their achievements are real. The problem is that we celebrate almost nothing else. We've let one narrow measure of success crowd out every other story worth telling: resilience, effort, the student who came back from a terrible trial exam, the one who turned up every day despite everything going on at home: the loss of a parent, divorce, illness. The one who got their C in the subject that nearly broke them.
A results day worth having
Results day should be a day of pride, whatever the grades say. It should be the day we tell every young person, clearly and without qualification, that they showed up, they tried, and that is enough. It should be the day we ask how they're feeling before we ask what they got.
The UK and Singapore are two of the only countries that have national exams at 16. Why are we still putting our young people under this pressure? At SMMIS we do have iGCSE’s but we don’t put them on a pedestal. We do share our results, because we want to show parents that our children can do well, even without the external pressures, and we celebrate the success of all of our students because we know they all tried their best.
It's time for a change in what we choose to shout about. Let's publish the numbers that actually tell us our young people are okay, and let's make sure, every single year, that they are.
Elaine Robinson
SMMIS Principal
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