State school voices: ‘My A-levels were awful. I feel like I’ve been robbed’ | Exams

Last week’s A-level results revealed a growing educational divide between state school pupils and those who have been privately educated – one which has been exacerbated by Covid. Experts believe this week’s GCSE results are likely to show a similar trend. The Observer spoke to two state school students about their hopes for the future.

Eleanor White*, 16, is a state school student waiting for her GCSE results in Cambridgeshire

“Halfway through my GCSEs last year, half my teachers left. They had obviously been forced to put off their moves due to Covid. That meant I started year 11 last September with several new teachers. I found it difficult – I need to form a relationship with my teachers to be able to ask them questions. Also, some of them weren’t always really sure where we were at, so we would go over loads of topics. And one teacher who has long Covid was off for a significant amount of time.

“At my school, the science GCSE is a three-year course. So I started that subject in 2020 and it was heavily disrupted by the pandemic. We were supposed to do all practical experiments that year: we never did any of them. I remember there was one osmosis practical involving a potato that we had to watch on YouTube. I think I fell asleep during it.

“Yet we could have been asked about all of those experiments, that we only ever read about in textbooks, during the exams.

“My mental health suffered a lot during the lockdown. My mum was on the clinically vulnerable list and had to isolate separately from the rest of us. I’m an only child and I struggled when we finished the online lessons. I got quite lonely, stuck on my own in one room all the time, and developed an eating disorder. Then, when I went back to school, I caught Covid. That caused a lot of chaos at home.

“It’s a bit nerve-racking, hearing about how the A-levels have been downgraded. The pandemic has been hard on all of us and I’m a high achiever: at one point I was constantly worrying that my grades were going to drop. Towards the end of the course, we did a lot of reviewing of topics that the teachers thought we might have missed or not done fully, which was quite overwhelming. It made me feel panicky that I’d missed loads of the curriculum. I think I probably worked too hard. By the time I got study leave to revise for my exams in year 11, I was burnt out and tired.”

Didar Rahman*, 18, has just received his A-level results from his state school in London

“I’ve seen a huge drop-off in my grades ever since Covid happened, and I did not get anything like the A-levels I was predicted. I am Bangladeshi and come from a low-income background – my father supports a family of six on an income of less than £25,000 in London – and it was very stressful during the pandemic as we were all at home. My dad had a laptop for work and I had to share that with him to do my schoolwork. Our internet connection was very bad and we couldn’t afford to upgrade it. That caused a lot of issues.

“I was a top student before the pandemic but I found studying at home really difficult. My family environment is quite noisy and distracting and I don’t even have a desk or anything like that. I had to study on my bed. It wasn’t ideal.

“During the final year of my GCSEs, there were lots of Covid outbreaks and we kept being sent home. I was expected to teach myself everything using the resources on Google classrooms and I found it stressful if I didn’t understand something.

“When we did go in, they constantly tested us, instead of teaching us, to figure out what we didn’t know, so we didn’t even learn anything. Sometimes whole departments would go home because there was an outbreak among the staff. We ended up being taught a lot by teaching assistants.

“I never got to sit my GCSEs and I think that put me at a disadvantage when I took my A-levels this year. Some of my teachers hadn’t finished teaching us the syllabus by the time of the exams, because they’d had to spend so much time teaching everyone the GCSE content first.

“I also hadn’t experienced sitting official exams in an exam hall since I was 11 years old. I got such a sick feeling in my stomach. I’d never felt that way before. In my head it was like: this is it.

“I had tried my best to revise. I’d started at Easter, but I’d never had the opportunity to get into the habit of studying for an exam before. There were so many things I learned about revision techniques that I felt I should have known already. I worked so hard and felt so stressed, I found it difficult to sleep. At one point, I took up smoking. I was sure I was going to do terribly in exams.

“My results were awful and I’m going to have to do a foundation year at my second-choice university in order to get on to my chosen BA course. That’s going to cost me and my family an extra £20,000 of debt. I feel as if I have been robbed.

I think it’s unfair, the way my cohort has been treated. If I had got the exact same marks last year, I would have got into a much better university. When I think about all I went through, to do so badly – it’s like someone has spat in my face.”

* Names have been changed