Do you know what education secretary Gavin Williamson did yesterday? He broke young people.

Do you know what my school did yesterday? They left me, a vulnerable young person, with a “take care of yourself”. Not once did they acknowledge how hard the past few months have been, not once did they show the care or warmth that so many desperately needed.

We invested ourselves into these subjects. We haven’t just been stripped of grades - we’ve lost the sense of purpose so many were hanging on to, the possibility of envisaging a brighter future, one where we can make lifelong friends at university and get a job and, you know, the “best years of your life”. 

But we’ve not lost them because of our incompetence, not because of laziness or other characteristics frequently assigned to young people. We’ve lost them because we simply didn’t have the opportunity to try. Pubs opened, restaurants opened, Years 10 and Year 12 went back to school, and we stayed at home. 

A-level results: Students robbed of opportunities

We were built up for five agonising months, only to be knocked down. If only the government knew just how many students cried themselves to sleep last night. 

I’d like to think I’m more eloquent than the B in English literature tells me I am. I’d like to think my teacher wasn’t wrong when she gave me full marks in my coursework, when she believed in me more than my standardised results seem to indicate. I’d like to think that I deserved more. 

I’d also like to think that these results don’t define me. But when education has formed such a big part of your existence for so long, it feels like they certainly do. 

I know I’m one of the lucky ones, receiving a place at university despite missing my two-grade offer. But I missed AA. I got ABC. The burning shame of missing my offer, of feeling that I didn’t know who I was any more, what I was doing, where I was going. The way my head was pounding will stay with me for a while. 

I want to be heard

I can hear the question: “But you got into university - so what else do you want?”

Well, let me tell you: I want empathy and compassion, not “life’s unfair”. I want grades that reflect my capability, and not ones that compound the heaviness in my chest. 

I want to be heard. I don’t want people simply to talk of “downgraded grades” - I want them to know what it actually means, what those five months of listless boredom and unending time felt like. It’s only now we’re remembered. 

I’m tired. And, if we’re really extending the metaphor here, with all this rhetoric of the “triple-lock” system and a safety net, then the system has trapped us. There’s no safety net for Year 13 in September. We aren’t going back to school. Mocks are not a safety net: my centre-assessment grade, my mock, my result were all the same for one of my subjects. We’re told to move on, but tied to our past.

I’m tired of autumn exams being used as some sort of antidote to the pain, some sort of consolation to pacify a dissatisfied child. 

Tainted by an algorithm

The proposed autumn exams offer a sense of respite, but are contingent on the assumption that all students completed the course, which is not true. How will children unable to access a laptop be able to complete their course? How will we gather the emotional and physical energy to revise in two months a course that takes two years?

Applying to university after results also means that students, particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds, receive less support when applying

The news is relentless. But the story is not the same everywhere. It’s not. Some schools have had 80 per cent of grades downgraded. 

The individual identities of ambitious students cannot be simply reduced to a collective statistic. We need to stop looking at the “big picture”. Overall, it may be a flawless bell curve. But the lives of individual students have been tainted and shaped by an algorithm. 

Teachers, SLTs, heads of years: please check in on your students if you can. We’re young, we’re vulnerable. Anything - a postcard, a smile, an email, a “how are you?” - may mean more than you’ll ever know. 

As for my year? By next week, we’re gone, done and dusted, GCSEs and back-to-school will begin to take precedence, Results day is over, and a generation of young people have been left behind.

Kimi Chaddah is a Year 13 student at a secondary school in the North West