Now would probably be a good time for colleges to start bracing themselves for GCSE results day next Thursday.

There has been a 40 per cent rise in the number of students taking English and maths in colleges. If you include those students taking IGCSE English, the overall college cohort this summer was 235,000. And with colleges still getting to grips with large-scale resits - in many cases consisting of demotivated students lacking in confidence and labelled failures following their experiences in school - it’s difficult to overstate the challenges they face, both inside and outside the classroom.

Factoring in the Pandora’s box that is the comparable outcomes approach favoured by Ofqual, there would be little surprise if the A*-C pass rates among older students dropped when this year’s results came out.

But a single figure can’t convey the difficult and varied educational backstories students bring to college, and the varied and complex needs that cash-strapped colleges have to try and meet. For some learners, improving a maths grade from an E to a D is a triumph, even if it remains below the magical C-grade boundary. For others, even managing to sit behind a desk in a packed exam hall is an achievement in itself. This kind of progress is vital, but is not something that our one-size-fits-all approach to education can ever capture.

Cause for optimism

Within this somewhat gloomy landscape, there are some reasons to be optimistic, however. Julia Belgutay’s analysis of last year’s results highlights a few success stories: the colleges that, against the odds, have achieved results with challenging cohorts that their neighbouring schools would have been proud of.

We deliberately restricted our analysis to colleges with cohorts of 100 students or more. After all, delivering strong results at a large scale is an important part of the challenge that colleges have been presented with. And the figures have certainly piqued the interest of Sir Kevan Collins, whose Education Endowment Foundation is now striving to uncover the approaches to English and maths that generate the most improvement for post-16 learners.

So, to those colleges achieving impressive results in the resit race, congratulations. Here’s hoping that, whatever the overall picture, Thursday brings some more success stories for the sector to share.