Results season is a time for celebration for many, but not everyone. Some children will come away disappointed, others devastated because they will have been judged to have failed.

The benchmarks of standard and strong passes consign some children to failure, including many of the children I’ve worked with in special schools who have sat GCSEs, despite the great progress they made. (I believe it was Tom Sherrington who has argued for a closer alignment with music exams, where candidates pass at certain levels as they progress; they don’t repeatedly fail until they reach Grade 8.) 

One thought I always have on these days is that a child’s 11 or 13 years in school can be distilled down to a collection of grades. These are obviously not unimportant, but anyone who has spent any time with teenagers will know that there is so much more to celebrate about what they do and what they contribute to society, and much of this is not reflected in their exam performance. That string of letters, and now numbers, doesn’t define a person, although I’m sure that’s exactly how it feels to many on results day.

At the end of last term I was honoured to be asked to attend the awards’ evening of my alma mater, Brakenhale School. As I spoke to the assembled students I urged them to, among other things, make a lifelong commitment to supporting others, especially those less fortunate than themselves.

I know many children already do this - they volunteer, they raise money for charities - but these are achievements that can be marginalised or sold to children as adornments to their CV. They are not held aloft and worshipped in the same way that GCSE and A Level results are, yet they can provide some of the strongest evidence of the superb character, determination and attitude of our children.

The Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme recognises the importance of volunteering, for example, by giving it prominence, but the D of E is extra-curricular in many schools. (Interestingly, there are many special schools that place this scheme as part of their standard curriculum and use its flexibility and breadth brilliantly.)

I know many schools run a service programme; indeed, it was through such a programme that Carwarden House, where I was first a headteacher, developed a deep relationship with Wellington College and this had a transformative effect on some young people from both schools.

My concerns grew recently when I learned in a speech by universities minister Sam Gyimah of the launch of “the first major analysis of the longitudinal education outcomes - or LEO - data for people five years after graduation. This data set tells us in unprecedented detail how much graduates from different courses and institutions earn after leaving university.” 

This transactional view of studying leaves me cold. To be fair to the minister, he did go on to say that “there is more to a university degree than lifetime earnings”, but I believe such an analysis is still misguided. Any programme of study at whatever level should have inherent value and be worth it for its own sake. The existence of tuition fees does, though, make this line harder to hold.

I know all teachers want to develop in the children they work with a desire to contribute to society’s efforts to make their communities better places. I worry, though, that we risk inadvertently promoting a narrow view of what it means to be a successful human being.

This is how we end up with perverse policies hiding in plain sight, such as at St Olave’s grammar school in Bromley, where children were forced off A level courses after being arbitrarily judged as failures. Some of the finest human beings in that school may have been excluded because their attainment seemingly reflected badly on the school. Their other achievements in life, some of which, I am sure, will have been very impressive, counted for nought.

Let’s ensure that, on results days, we remember and celebrate, too, the many ways our children have enhanced their communities and our schools during their time with us that won’t appear near the top of that crucial page of A4 paper headed: EXAM RESULTS.

Jarlath O’Brien is director for schools at the Eden Academy