Northern Lights: We have become expert at talking to young people about their futures

It’s a day marked by footage of smiling eighteen-year-olds jumping for joy at their examination results. It’s day to celebrate success and achievement, and perhaps to remind us all of the power of education and of the opportunities education can open.

The pandemic disrupted this. Over the three examination cycles of 2020, 2021 and 2022, the normal routine of examinations was changed. Initially, the pandemic simply made it impossible to run examinations, and teacher assessed grades replaced examination results. Given the disruptions which the pandemic produced it was quite right that young people were given the benefit of the doubt, and the proportion of higher grades increased sharply.

This year, the London government made a tough decision: it decided that the 2023 grades would return to the 2019, pre-pandemic, grade distributions. Governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland set a longer time period for the return to pre-pandemic grades and that would have probably been fairer in England. In many respects, the 2023 cohort of 18-year-old students are the unluckiest so far. Like their 2022 counterparts, they did not sit their GCSEs, instead being awarded results based on teacher assessment. So, their A levels and BTEC examinations are the first formal examinations for most of them and, of course, they are students who’s teaching earlier in their teens was so profoundly disrupted by the pandemic. This means that this year’s students have been measured against 2019 A level students who did not experience any disruption to their education.

The impact of the government’s decision to move quickly back to pre-pandemic grade distributions has been significant. There are far fewer higher grades this year. The general view is that students are likely to score two grades lower than if they had been awarded their results in 2021. And there is early evidence that the most disadvantaged of our young people have been impacted the most. The Government’s post-Covid education recovery programme, designed to help remediate lost learning, was inadequate. Calls from their Education Recovery Tsar, Sir Kevan Collins, for significant additional spending were ignored. Collins’ recommendations would have had the biggest impact on those students from more disadvantaged backgrounds who missed out on the additional learning hours promised.

Whilst moving back to pre-pandemic grade boundaries was inevitable, to do so this year, for a cohort of students who have missed out on so much, is premature. The governments of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have taken a more measured approach. They have continued to adjust marks in recognition of the long-term impact of the pandemic on learners and their outcomes. It would have been better return to pre-pandemic grade boundaries in England over a couple of years.

This all made for a tough 2023 results day for students, and, frankly, not helped by the decision of the Secretary of State for Education to choose results day to declare that in ten years’ time, ‘no-one will ask you about your A-level results’. At Sheffield Hallam we know that results are the outcome of hard work, and that the past few years have been very tough for young people.

We are keen to help young people make the right decisions for their future. And so, like many universities, Sheffield Hallam had a very lively Clearing day, with call volumes from students up almost 40%, and every one of them a conversation about choices, and about making the right decision for them.

A-level and BTEC results matter a lot for young people, and results day is always something of a rite of passage. This year, there are still many students who have yet to decide which direction they will take.

At Hallam, we have become very expert at talking to young people about their futures. We understand that young people need lots of information to make good choices for themselves and we want to help young people make the right choices – choices which will help them thrive, doing courses they enjoy, learning in ways that work for them, setting them up for future success.