A level of fear for all students

Or three or four of them holding hands and jumping into the air with delight. Or feigning nervousness when opening The Envelope – feigning it because they already know what their results are, having done those cartwheels…

But some really brave souls will have opened their envelopes for real on live TV and given their real-time reaction. That borders on some kind of voyeurism in much the same way that motorists rubber-neck as they drive slowly past an accident scene – viewers waiting with bated breath because while they want the student in the camera spotlight to do well it’s way more interesting telly if they don’t.

It’s an emotional time finding out the results of the past two years’ work and I don’t know why kids let themselves be set up for it, whether enticed to do so by their teachers on behalf of TV crews or by the TV crews themselves. An anticipated moment of fame that could go so horribly wrong.

Then we get the stories about the student who has got three A grades against all the odds, who did their exams while lying prone or whatever in a hospital bed, and the twins who got six A*s between them, or the triplets who got ten. Maybe there’s been the odd ten-year-old too, who’s got an A grade in applied maths and is now all set to start tutelage with a top-notch maths professor at Cambridge.

This, I hasten to add, is not to decry the efforts of the thousands of A-level students who got their results last Thursday. Despite those who say A-levels are easier than they were back in the day – although it’s true that fewer than one in ten got A grades in the 1980s compared to one in four now, but maybe we were just a bit thicker back then – embarking on an intensive two-year study programme when you’re still not technically an adult, but upon which the direction of your whole adult future depends, is not for the faint-hearted.

When we got our A-level results we didn’t all gather at school and swap results sheets, do cartwheels or jump up and down together. No, the results were posted out to you on a postcard, so even the postman knew how you’d fared before you did, and you got them on the Friday – one of the few occasions that first class stamps adorned postcards in the days when first class mail really did mean next day delivery.

However, if you were really keen to know on the day itself, you were instructed to telephone the school at a particular time to speak to the headmistress so she could inform you herself how you’d done. That was scary. Especially as she didn’t particularly like me and thought my desire to be a journalist was way out of line with what she expected of her girls who, if they were clever, went on to do medicine, and if they weren’t so bright – in her eyes at least – were told to go to teacher training college.

She held up my application form for a year-long newspaper industry training course with all the disdain of someone holding up a dead mouse by its tail, so I didn’t expect anything supportive or complimentary from her. Still, the dreaded phone call extracted I’d got the required two A-level passes for my course – I even got a grudging “well done” – and for 24 hours I was on cloud nine. I might even have done the odd cartwheel or two.

Then the next day the postcard was shoved through the letterbox and there it was – not two A-level passes, but just one. I called the school back and she swore blind she’d told me I’d only got one pass. She hadn’t – she’d made a mistake and compounded it by not being big enough to admit it and lied to me instead. I was devastated.

They say you should never tell an A level student it’s not the end of the world if they don’t achieve the grades they want and from bitter experience I know exactly why. For that day was the end of my world. At least at the time… So while I say well done to all those students who got the A-level grades they wanted, for those who didn’t, have a great big virtual hug from me.