A Level results day: what’s possible?
A Level results day and I am thinking about what’s possible, which is the question that lies at the heart of my work with young people.
Some educators talk about being positive with students and there is certainly huge benefit in working with the optimistic energy that drives positivity. But this energy can feel like an expectation and an imposition to young people experiencing the stresses and strains of adolescence. For that reason, I prefer to explore possibilities.
Possibility is a relatively neutral word. In possibility, we have the space to talk about uplifting outcomes alongside compromises and set-backs because students know that things can go well and they can go wrong. They also know about the muddle and uncertainty that exist between these two polarities. And most teaching takes place in this middle zone.
As students work towards public examinations, we talk with them about their intended outcomes and we address the possibilities that come into play if their results are not as they hope. Today, all those hypothetical conversations become concrete as students are awarded a set of lettered grades representing two years’ work. The BBC news page currently carries excellent advice for parents about how to support young people through this time and I encourage families to talk to about what these results make possible.
Students who do not achieve their grades and cannot take up their university places as intended will feel awful and it is crucial that we acknowledge and validate those feelings. Only then can we begin - gently - to talk about what is possible with the grades that they have achieved. My own university department at Lancaster started the day with an Instagram post reminding A Level students that it welcomes applicants through clearing and this will be true for almost all departments across the country. The clearing process removes the need for A Level re-sits and enables students to find places with the grades that they have just been awarded.
For young people with sharply defined ambitions, including those who want to read medicine at university, re-taking one or two A Levels is a possibility and tutors often support students who need additional teaching beyond school or college.
An alternative is to use wonky A Level results as a spring-board for a change of plan. One of my students achieved a A for A Level English Literature but did not achieve the required grades in Maths and Physics and could not take up their conditional place at an Oxbridge college. Initially devastated, this student did not want to engage with the immediacy of clearing and so opted for a year in employment and the chance to re-think further education. After three months of data entry for an accountancy firm, this student sent me an email with a link to Manchester University’s BA in Digital Media, Culture and Society, explaining that the course’s combination of work placement and interdisciplinary data analysis felt like the right fit. This personal evolution did not come easily but it does demonstrate how possibility can hold both the experience of disappointment and its subsequent adaptations.
For me, this week, seeing the Northern Lights was not possible. Yes, everyone else saw them. Yes, thank you, I did see the press images of the Northern Lights over Kendal, taken less than two miles from our home. Yes, there was a red aurora alert for Cumbria and yes, I did stay up throughout the darkest hours of Monday night.
By 0330am on Tuesday morning, however, I was starting to sway with fatigue as a heavy grumpiness settled upon me. Barefoot in the garden wearing a motely array of nightwear, I folded my arms in irritation and frowned at the sky, trying to conjure up either a meteor shower or the pink and green wash of the Northern Lights. I managed neither. But the inhalation after my heavy sigh brought me the scent of damp lavender and the spicy note of fennel, which towered over me as a shadowy umbellifier. I took another breath, acknowledging the garden’s consolation. Then I stepped towards the old dolly tub to rub my fingers against the scented leaves of Attar of Roses, the pink pelargonium that I grow in memory of my friend Bina.
It is not all bad, I told myself. No Northern Lights but lovely smells. Then, as I tilted my head to puff my disappointment up at the sky, I saw first one shooting star and then another. I watched the steady, rhythmic blink of a far-off satellite over Potter Fell until a sudden rush of white and a pale arc of feathers smudged the darkness to my left. I took a sharp breath but it was another second before I made sense of the swift shape as a hunting barn owl, scouring the field-edge and wheeling away when it registered a lump of human too near for comfort.
I took the glimpse of the owl to bed with me, wondering if it was the same bird that we had seen on our late evening walk. Following the line of the track to the farm yard, the owl had flown through the open doors of the bank barn just after 9.30pm and I was glad to see it enjoying shelter now that the marauding jackdaws have completed their nesting cycle. I fell asleep thinking about the owl, too tired to make sense of vague thoughts about possibility, surprise and disappointment.
Now, rested and one mug of coffee into results day, I am very glad of the barn owl and the shooting stars. And I have a sneaking suspicion that my Northern Lights no-show was the result of a lack of ambition on my part so I have made a two part plan:
1. I will keep a close eye on Lancaster University’s AuroraWatch;
2. I will make sure that I am on (much) higher ground the next time that there is an amber or a red alert so that I increase my chances of success.
I have also warned friends and family that - should this plan prove unsuccessful - then I will be off to Norway in search of a natural world light-show and I share this possibility in honour of all A Level students receiving their results today. I have great and enduring faith in young people and I know that they too will navigate the possible in the months to come.