“No matter how hard we try, we’re taught that any perceived academic failure could affect the rest of our lives”
Writing in The Independent, Romy McCarthy says:
“On GCSE results day this week, I couldn’t help but cast my mind back to the daunting day last year as I walked through the school gates with my parents, trying my best to read my teachers’ faces thinking: are my results catastrophic? Have I failed? My teacher is refusing to make eye contact, I must have bombed it… and so on.
I remember feeling through the envelope, trying to guess the results, as I rushed through the rain to find a quiet spot where I could face what felt like monumental news to me at the time. It felt like my world would come crashing down if I did not hit the marks. My future rested on what was in that envelope, my happiness relied on those letters and numbers. This is what rushes through many 16-year-olds’ minds. This is what it feels like for the majority of young people collecting their results this week. This is the reality.
A survey carried out by the NHS in 2017 found that 17 per cent of people between the ages of 17 and 19 have a mental health disorder. This is commonly attributed to increased social media use, but adults all too often fail to notice the common denominator which affects children of all genders and backgrounds on a daily basis: the flawed education system …”
You can read more here.
And in Bad Education you can read about related failings of the education system – in terms of mental health and fostering wellbeing – when it comes the National Curriculum.
