The tears have dried. The shock has faded. The photos of students jumping in glee are, if we’re honest, best forgotten. Everyone has moved on from GCSEs. Everyone, that is, except the thousands who will need to resit them.
So many of them fail that we shouldn’t put them through this, say the Association of Colleges and ASCL. They would like to see the policy scrapped. It’s well-meant, no doubt, but as a resit teacher, I dissent from their opinion.
I sympathise with the view. After all, this year’s benchmark for GCSE English resits at 17+ is 20.9 per cent, against an overall English pass rate of 61.6 per cent. It seems to make sense to cut our losses. But it doesn’t.
In our college in Stoke this year, our English resit pass rate was 63.3 per cent. Extrapolating, that is equivalent to a whole cohort pass rate of 80-85 per cent over two years. Include those who never resat at all and we’re still probably at around 75 per cent. That is ridiculously high.
It is also entirely predictable. We do it again and again, year after year. And this in a city which has perennially had a problem with pass rates. A population that’s been written off again and again. We do not think we are wrong in saying that our Stoke students consistently have the best English resit pass rates in the whole country.
Did our students want to resit English? No! Would they have opted to if they’d had a choice? Never. They did it because they had to. And now look at them.
Some have progressed onto level 3 courses. Others have moved on to degrees which would otherwise have been inaccessible to them. I would not want anyone to take that away from them.
We should never leave our young people in their failure
We all know that there is a hidden curriculum behind what we teach. A while ago, resilience was the buzzword. Resilience. Tenacity. Determination. Character. Grit. Our students do not just walk away with a well-won qualification. They walk away with character. I’d swear they even walk away taller.
They come to us with crushed dreams, burning disappointment and bruised self-esteem, but they leave us knowing they are better than they were told. They walk away with far more than a pass mark. They leave with a life lesson: They failed once, yes, but then overcame.
And if that’s the lesson, then consider what future students will learn if we cut and run: it was too hard, so we walked away.
There are ways to raise aspirations and the resit pass rate. They aren’t magic or arcane; we simply give them our best. If you come and visit, I dare say you won’t be surprised by us or our students. But come back on results day and you will be as surprised as they are themselves.
So we cannot take this chance away from them. By forcing them to resit, we might be delaying their progress. We might even be frustrating them. But we would do them a disservice by taking this opportunity to prove themselves away. Some people simply need more time.
We should never leave our young people in their failure. (And whatever you may say, they themselves will always call it a failure.) Surely we should teach them that they are more than an initial stumble?
So we will not be advocating writing students off and giving up on them. Why would we ever do that? Some of these students have been written off all their lives. We refuse to perpetuate that.
We will show them who we know them to be. And we will keep on making them resit English. I know that most of them will pass, whatever they believe at the start. Because they always do. Our students are their own proof.
Every single year, I see previously jaded and broken students leaving college like toddlers skipping from playgroup, bursting with joy and full of surprise. And that is worth the world. It’s certainly worth the work.
As a sector, we may not yet be delivering on the policy’s promise, but we deserve better than our representatives throwing the towel in on our behalf.
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