There’s so much that could be said about results day. And this is one like no other. Many have said much, and said it far better. The uncertainty endemic in this Covid time has filled everything. And results day is no exception.

But, I just have something to add.

In April and May I spent many pained hours assessing my A Level students - pained because I was desperate to get it right, to give them the chance to get a result which honoured their hard work both before and during lockdown. All the time aware their futures were on the line.

We did mocks, we rigorously tested, we did tutorials to assess every nuance of their competence. We were to all intents and purposes *more* rigorous that any exam would have been. And we asked our students to do that while the world fell apart.

It’s a pressure way beyond any exam stress. And it’s one students stepped up to. They did their coursework knowing it might not matter, they sat mocks on zoom, they were assessed again and again and again. And that’s just students I’d taught all year. I knew them.

But then, June hit. The government realised that they had literally thousands of students who were centre less - they sat exams at a centre but didn’t go to school there ordinarily. Centres turned round and refused to predict grades. These students faced no results at all.

Our college stepped in. We became a global centre for assessing disenfranchised students. For hours and hours, over an intensive period, I assessed student after student I didn’t know and will likely never meet. Students from across the world.

This was not arbitrary. We tested rigorously. I assessed every facet of their knowledge I could. Again, way beyond exams would. Each assessment objective tested and retested. I threw brand new topics at them to see how fast they picked things up, gauged their analysis..

People talk about the rigour or the tutorial method. This tested its limits, and amidst all this assessing, each student was (naturally) terrified (not, I hope, of me). I cared how each student did. Support and concern were, and always are, at the forefront of everything I did.

I gently pushed each to see how much they knew and played the what-would-they-have-got track countless times in my head. Reports were written, detailed justification of every aspect of each students performance given.

The metric kept shifting. And we shifted accordingly.

None of this is clear cut. It never was. Decisions were chaotic from the start. (Yes I know I know pandemic, and all those lives, I know. It’s horrific. I’d never want to suggest it’s not. But our students lives matter too). The government delayed and delayed deciding what to do.

And in these delays the gut punch of uncertainty keeps coming back. As boards, governments, regulators grapple with things, I wish they had been in the nitty gritty and yes painful business of assessing individuals. Perhaps then they’d see one size fits all hurts most if not all.

And before assumptions of inflation of grades are levelled at teachers, they’d do well to perhaps just ask what really happened. Generalisations, as I often remind students, weaken your argument and suggest, on the whole, you don’t really know what you’re talking about after all.