GCSE results, what to do with them next.

As our A-level students celebrate, commiserate and covert their collected points into higher and further education courses, we too should take stock, especially since, as I write, the younger cohort approach their day of dread this Thursday for the GCSE results and will need advice on what to do next. Being guided alone by the results is not necessarily the best thing to do.

Once again for many years running, as pointed out by Joanne Stuart, in her letter to the Belfast Telegraph last week, Northern Ireland has beaten UK averages in the proportion of A and A* in the cohort. But Joanne goes on to show that below the surface, all is not well. In the Sciences, we are beginning to fall below the national curve. The Institute of Physics, for example, made National news last week, reporting the success of the “Brian Cox Effect” with Physics back in the top 10 A-levels for the first time in nearly a decade. So not only are we below the average, we’re actually going the opposite way. Joanne argues,

“The [NI] economic future will not be achieved without the supply of STEM skills and knowledge and that has to start with the attraction of young people into STEM disciplines at school” and so “..businesses must be involved in all aspects of STEM promotion, from partnering with primary schools to develop children’s interest, through supporting careers guidance, facilitating CPD for teachers and developing skills within schools.”

I agree and that begins now, if not before, with this cohort just deciding what to do with their GCSE collection.

The next generation of AS- and A-level students will face a world, in which, practically all issues (and hence all jobs in global growth sectors) depend on the success of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. That’s why it’s front and centre of (nearly) every national and regional economic strategy. We are likely to be no different when it’s published but we haven’t bottomed it out yet. However the only dissent I have heard concern capacity and the need to continue to import STEM talent and that hardly alters the logic.

I think parents, teachers and principals have to look beyond the headline results. I offer myself as a case in point. My worst mark ever and by a long way was in first form Science. Yet it was some of the experiments, now sadly not done at school for reasons of health and safety, in which we transformed red Mercury oxide into a pool of liquid metal Mercury by blowing a Bunsen flame on to a little pile of the red powder on a depression in a block of graphite. I understand the H&S arguments but what a pity for every child not to experience directly the wonderment of the alchemists and the job that must be done for us all by business and industry.

I went on to even up the score between my subjects so that pre O-level, it was very unclear what to do. Mind you my parents, most of my teachers and definitely my principal knew what was good for me. The results supported that but I suspect that, even if they hadn’t, I would have been pushed STEMward. I think we owe it to our kids and to our economy not to let other arguments outweigh the need to get back on track with Science and Maths.