Tuesday saw a live screening of The Royal Ballet’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake from The Royal Opera House, relayed to more than 1,000 cinemas. On-screen compère Dame Darcey Bussell, former principal of The Royal Ballet, described how arduous it is to be one of the many swans in the corps de ballet. While the audience focuses on the principals, the swans stand agonisingly still before launching into a demanding sequence of ballet moves. The only way to prevent cramp, she said, is to keep breathing: but when you’re so anxious not to move, you stop doing so.

That image of keyed-up people needing to breathe but lacking the nerve to reminded me of exam season. In senior schools, it’s been going on for the best part of six weeks. Students, for whom the end is now in sight but still a few papers away, are tired and fed-up with the protracted ordeal. Parents are at the end of their tether trying to handle the anxieties at home. As for teachers: well, in schools we feel we’re constantly picking up the pieces.

Even with the gradual demise of AS levels (and thus of examining in Year 12), schools are still negotiating the quick-sands and whirlpools of a monstrous, sprawling system that threatens to suck the lifeblood out of school by taking half a term out of young people’s lives, a period in which they might otherwise be still learning, gaining in experience and wisdom and, frankly, having a life.

Moreover, nowadays the pressure is on young people to an extent never experienced before. The pre-exam season is characterised, in many subjects, by the completion of coursework. It’s arguably less pressured for children than actual exams - until several deadlines collide. Super-organised candidates handle it: but normal human beings get in a mess, and there are tears, late nights and added worry.

Then there’s the imperative to do well. GCSE results may or may not be life-changing for our students, but those with university ambitions must notch up a string of top grades, while schools themselves have a vested interest in getting children to achieve the best they can. Those league tables, benchmarks and Progress 8 performance measures mean that middling candidates in particular risk being pushed relentlessly to turn that 4 into a 5. 

Anxiety rising

University offers are now so stratospherically high that even those candidates for whom A levels might have been a breeze (they do exist!) are required to gain such a crop of A* grades for their top university course that they are under as much pressure as the rest.

Add to that pupils’ well-publicised shocks on encountering the new, tougher style of exams (widely reported in the media this year), and the cauldron of anxiety is well and truly bubbling.

Against this backdrop, candidates (and particularly their parents) may seek out every possible chance of winning a concession. Children troop to the GP’s to get that note about hay-fever, a host of other conditions and, indeed, anxiety, while parents constantly phone school insisting that they send in that special consideration form. Bless them, they forget that (if I remember rightly) even the loss of a limb allows only an extra 5% - or is that apocryphal?

On top of all that, we have yet to see how this year’s marking regime, let alone that increasingly deterrent re-mark and appeal process, pans out.

Instead of chopping off its head and starting again, we only ever tinker with the exam monster. There’s neither political will, energy nor money to do anything radical. For example, those of us who have passed a career dreaming of a system in which students apply to university after A levels (PQA) will be forever disappointed.

So don’t blame schools, parents or students for anxiety in the air: it’s endemic. And don’t hold your breath awaiting change, because none will come quickly. On the contrary, take Dame Darcey’s advice. Breathe deeply: at least the pain won’t get worse.

Dr Bernard Trafford is a writer, educationalist and musician. He is a former headteacher of the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, and past chair of HMC. He is currently interim headteacher of the Purcell School in Hertfordshire. He tweets @bernardtrafford