Projected on to a screen in the hall at Brighton Hall Community School is a translation guide to GCSE grades. On one side are listed grades A*-G; on the other side, grades 1-9, with the 9 floating somewhere just above the A*.

“The 1-9 is annoying,” says 16-year-old Prakritee Gurng. She is standing at the gates of the Basingstoke secondary, waiting to be allowed in to pick up her grades. “Like, why would they do it in our year? New schemes of work, new topics.”

She pauses. “What’s more stressful is all those celebrities saying, ‘I failed my GCSEs and now I’m on holiday in Santorini with my butler.’ I’m, ‘Oh. Some of us are normal.’”

Next to her, 16-year-old Sammie Burton nods in agreement. “Teachers didn’t really know what they were doing. They were in the dark.”

Then it is time: the pupils all troop into school. “Help yourselves to tissues on the way in,” says headteacher Chris Edwards (pictured).

He is joking: in fact, he is pleased with the school’s results. In English, 79 per cent of pupils achieved grade 4 and above. In maths, the figure was 72 per cent. Sixty-four per cent achieved grade 4 and above in both English and maths.

But the pupils do not know this. Most have their envelopes now, but are not opening them. Instead, they stand around chatting, their unopened envelopes flapping between them.

‘Pretty crazy’

There is a high-pitched scream from across the hall. “Yes!” a boy says. He picks up his friend and whirls him around in a circle.

Then more and more pupils open their envelopes. “I got a 7 in English literature,” says Sam Bennett, 16, holding his results sheet in front of him. “And I passed maths.

“The new system was very, very, very stressful - at the start, no one had much idea what was going on. It was pretty crazy. It’s not an amazing feeling, being the first year. But I’ve done pretty well, so it’s all right now.”

Guy Wilkinson, head of Year 11, says that very few of his pupils were keen on the idea of being exam-result guinea pigs.

“I think ‘uncertain’ is probably the word, in terms of knowing grade boundaries and exactly what the exams are going to look like,” he says. “I tried to remind them that next year’s Year 11s have all of their results like this, not just maths and English.”

He also tried to persuade his pupils that it was not the grade boundaries that mattered: it was knowing that they had tried their hardest. “We’re all very much trying to create the mindset of ‘let’s not think about the results’,” he says. “Let’s think about the effort that goes into it. If you got the effort right, then the result looks after itself.”

This was not entirely successful as a strategy. Though, he said, it did have one positive side-effect: the highest-ever attendance at their Easter revision school.

‘A bit of a pressure cooker’

“Them being teenagers, they obviously panicked at times,” Mr Wilkinson says. “It’s been a bit of a pressure cooker.”

He is not only talking about the pupils: staff, too, are feeling the pressure. “You get this set of numbers on paper and it takes quite a while to decode them and work out what they mean,” says Mr Edwards of the school’s results this year.

“Even when you work out what they mean, you have nothing to compare them to. So there’s no cause to celebrate. But, conversely, there’s no cause for despair.

“We’re going to be in a state of perpetual uncertainty, at least for a couple of years, until all this settles down.”

Back in the exam hall, however, there are very definite causes for celebration. One boy has the school’s only 9 grade: he holds out his envelope-opening hand, and it is shaking.

Prakritee, meanwhile, scored the top results in the school: four A*s, four As, a 6, a 7 and an 8. She leaves with her friends, visibly more relaxed than they were when they came in.

The English staff, too, look relieved. One, back from maternity leave for results day, stands in the corner with her baby. “Who knows what his GCSEs will look like,” she says, glancing into the pram. “They could be giving out shapes by then.”

Want to keep up with the latest education news and opinion? Follow Tes on Twitter and like Tes on Facebook