As students open their GCSE results today, English teacher Sophia Waugh remembers how one of her pupil's grades changed their life.
I have been very spoiled. I’ve had a sneaky suspicion about this for a while, but this year has forced the fact to my attention. Since moving to this school, I’ve never not had a top set GCSE class. Some years, I’ve had two sets, and then it’s usually a top one and a set three.
This year, I have had one and a half sets, and they are set three and four.
I’m not complaining; nor should I. Nevertheless, it’s a bit of a shock to the system. Where for years I’ve been chasing grades 7 (old style A) and above, for the next two years I’ll be praying for 4s and 5s. The potential grades of the students I teach this year and next range from 2 to 5, compared with my last Year 11, whose targets ranged from 5 to 8. This year, my students don’t know the name of the Prime Minister, let alone the Latin for chicken. I wonder whether they even know what Latin is.
Maybe they have good reason; those facts aren’t going to help them much in life, but ignorance does lead to less good conversation. Lessons are going to be more about the plot of Macbeth than questioning his existential difficulties.
We teachers love to list the pros and cons of having lower sets. On the positive side, they write much less so the marking is much lighter. On the negative side, behaviour is likely to be worse, so each lesson can be more of a struggle.
On the positive side, classes are much smaller. On the negative, they become even smaller as the children start to drift away, truanting or just missing more and more school for a variety of unconvincing reasons.
Above all, I’m going to have to work hard to enjoy these classes. I don’t by any means dread the classes, but they don’t engage my brain so much.
While studying An Inspector Calls (as ever), they were suitably shocked and baffled by the denouement, and they still struggled to remember who the characters are, never mind the difference between socialism and capitalism.
When I returned to school in September, I had half-made a lazy decision to treat this year, which is lower-school heavy (another first for me, I am usually given more older than younger classes), as a bit of a rest. Do my best, but don’t kill myself, was my plan. Spend more time on the PhD I have started, on madness in Victorian fiction, and less on my students. And yet. With the best will in the world (or the best lack of will), I don’t think I will manage to do this. The first doubt about my ability to tread water for a year came when I told the students their projected grades. The disbelief and joy on the faces of boys told they should be able to get a 4 (‘But I’m rubbish at English, Miss. I’ll never pass!’) was a glorious sight to behold. And if they want to hit their target, I want to help them get there. It might prove hard, but it will be worth the struggle.
While I was vacillating between idleness and ambition, we had the Open Evening, where we parade ourselves in an attempt to charm and tempt the best of the future to come to our school next year. The last few years have been oversubscribed, and last year’s results were the best ever, so we probably don’t have to try too hard.
However, during this (very long) evening, I was approached by a parent. ‘You taught my older boy,’ he said, and named him. Although he left at least three years ago, I remembered the boy, whose determination to pass English in the face of various difficulties had been admirable. ‘He’s in the army now,’ the father said. ‘He was the one who got his English GCSE and the rest are all having to resit it yet again. You changed his life. Thank you.’ And there it was. That old cliché of the recruitment advertisements: ‘Become a teacher. Change a life.’ It can happen. It does. And I’m going to bust a gut to do it again for my current crop of students.
