'Half term week – heaven or hell?' - Wolverhampton education consultant weighs in on pressures to study during school holidays as GCSE season looms
This week is half term week. For many families, that means one dominant theme: mock exams, revision schedules and preparation for the real exams in June. GCSEs and A levels loom large. Bedrooms become study zones. Conversations tighten around grades and predicted outcomes.
I have spent much of my life in education, and I am not anti-exam. Qualifications matter. They open doors. They provide structure and opportunity.
But I have become increasingly concerned about the overt emphasis placed on measurable attainment – and the anxiety that inevitably follows.
Of course, I believe in standards. I believe in rigour. I believe that qualifications can transform lives.
But I am convinced that we have crossed a line – that our fixation with measurable attainment has tipped into something unhealthy, even ideological.
We say we are educating. Often, we are simply training for assessment.
Decades ago, at an FE college not far from Wolverhampton, I saw the system reveal itself with startling clarity. I was teaching Seamus Heaney to an A-level class. The specification required students to study a prescribed selection from four collections. Fair enough. But literature is not a ration pack. So, I briefly widened the lens. I introduced them to Heaney beyond the anthology – the development of his voice, the politics beneath the pastoral, the mythic undercurrents, the spiritual unease.
In other words, I treated him as a human being rather than an exam commodity.
