Good morning, and if you’ve screwed up your A-levels, consider this: my results seemed fine and now I’m nearly 40 and getting up at five in the morning to send an email for a living. (This is called the reverse Clarkson.)
If that sort of consolation message is as familiar as a picture of teenage girls jumping in the air, this year’s results day did have more unusual – and significant – features.
The cohort of students in England, Wales and Northern Ireland who got their grades yesterday are the only group to have had their entire sixth form period disrupted by coronavirus; they are also the first whose results will be based on examination since before the pandemic. 43,000 of them were left without a university place last night, the highest number in a decade. What happens next will be one crucial measure of how our education system has emerged from the disruption of lockdown, and how long it will take to make up what was lost.
