It's (Not) All Over

There are few more nerve-wracking things in life that awaiting results. Whether it is for health reasons, a survey on the dream house you’ve seen or as with thousands of young people just this week waiting for exam grades, it is never a good time. But this year, those students may well be facing the ignominy of failing a test they have never actually taken.

The impact of Covid has been devastating, but we are only just beginning to see the extent of the collateral damage it has caused. Students caught in this most bizarre of years are just one example of how wide ranging the unforeseen effects are. When it first emerged that there was effectively no remainder of an academic year from March 2020, I wasn’t that fazed. But I wouldn’t be, would I? I had all that carry on 35 years ago, and had a reasonably successful first career under my belt. I also have the benefit of hindsight from my own experiences.

At sixteen, I gained a reasonably OK set of O levels. I was bullish, and ambitious, and had a plan to do my A levels in a year, and then get an early seat on a law degree - a whole twelve months ahead of my peers! As it panned out, it was a lot harder than I expected, and emergency surgery just before my finals resulted in me dipping the lot! Disaster, game over, endex. Rudderless, I entered the world of work.

What should I have done? Gone back to bloody college, of course! It meant that I’d lost the ‘advantage’ I thought I might have gained, and I was simply back on the same page as the peers I had left a year early. But with a lack of counsel, or coaching, I did what I thought was best. And lets be honest, at 17 we think we know it all, don’t we? It turns out this is incorrect!

I don’t regret how life turned out - I joined the police at 22 and had a good career. But it sort of just happened, caused by diminishing options rather than an absolute and definite destiny. And this is a really, really important lesson from my life which I’d wish to impart to those many, many lost souls that are wandering around in a daze right now, thinking their life is over and there is no hope because they have been screwed over by an algorithm.

I’ve got some great news - it isn’t!

You are 18 years old. There is absolutely no rush. Some years ago I read Duncan Bannatyne’s autobiography. He was selling ice cream out of a van on a Jersey beach when he was 30. Simon Cowell was back on his mum’s sofa at 32. And Jeremy Clarkson posts a tweet about this time every year pointing out he did miserably in his exams and yet was typing from the deck of a super yacht in Cap D’ Antibes. It is what inspired me to give my kids just one bit of advice; Do what inspires you until you are thirty, and then, if it hasn’t quite worked out, you might have to get a ‘real’ job. One teaches in Japan, and the other has founded her own marketing company. So far, so good.

2020 is a lost year for education. But that is no bad thing. It can now a time to steady the horizon, and work the alternatives. It looks like there will be an opportunity to sit exams in the Autumn, and there will certainly be chance to next year. What is going to count is what someone does with the time in the interim. If it is well spent, it might well be the differentiator between you and the others when it is your turn to enter the world of work. Maybe you’ve been thrown a real low ball like the young aspiring vet interviewed on TV. Predicted for an ABB, awarded DDD. Unsurprisingly, the University has declined to take her. She actually used the phrase ‘My life is over’. This is just not the case in any shape or form. Get some work experience in a veterinary practice, keep your studies topped up, take your exams at the earliest opportunity and prove your worth. Then apply to uni and continue on your chosen path. At eighteen, you’ve ‘lost’ a year but gained so much more in terms of experience, and demonstrating commitment, resilience and determination to any future employer.

Right now, we’ve all got a big part to play in coaching and mentoring our young people through a very uncertain, confusing and ambiguous time. If we get this right for those that have been disadvantaged by this fiasco, the class of 2020 might well turn out to be the greatest in many generations.

Derek Flint Cert.Ed. MCIPR.