Did I Go To School?
Reflections of an A-Level student

Simon Davies

Are we even getting an education? In the current school climate, it is a fair question to ask.

How many school students out there reading this feel like you are a ball being tossed around an over-sized tennis court with the politicians on one side of the net and the teaching staff on the other? It seems fair even to argue that our school days simply get us through our exams, and perhaps our real education doesn’t begin until we throw down the safeguard of maths first thing on a Monday and get a real occupation.

Today, I hear on a report on Central News that one in four students is not being taught maths by someone with the correct training. What does this say about our system? Is it failing us? By the sounds of it, it’s already failed those before us.

What I would love to do some day is round up every teacher in the UK and sits them down at an, again over-sized, table. I would ask each and every one of them whether teaching is a profession they chose, or simply one they drifted in to because they had nothing else to do. No matter what they do with the school system next, whether they abolish exams or make boarding school mandatory (God forbid), nothing will change the fact that inspiration is the vital factor missing from school at every turn. The teachers are becoming less and less inspired to teach, which in turn is having an adverse effect on the students. Ask yourself now, how many of them will become teachers.

The problem with school is - as a student in year 13 I can say this with my hand on heart - it's all about getting to the next step. Come the beginning of the year 9, we have to think about GCSEs, come the beginning of our GCSE course we must think about our A-Levels. They say live for the present (ideally). Well we are always learning for the future. There has not been one point in my school life when I could stop and reflect on the knowledge I have obtained. Grades mean reputation for a school, and perhaps knowledge is just too personal a thing to strive for on the larger, communal, scale. It would appear to me that a logical system would be one which takes into account everything you learn through school, so nothing is wasted, when assessing people.

So far this term in my English lesson on Othello, we have spent more time looking at assessment objectives (AOs) than discussing the play. I would like to ask Will sometime what he would like us to be doing with that play these days. The same thing applied for our coursework earlier in the year. Our teacher chose the book we studied based on her assumptions about whether we would find it easier to hit the AOs, even though the class consensus was that the book was a bore compared to the inspirational 1984 by George Orwell, which was the original option.

Has someone forgotten the objective that schools listen to the wants of the students and create the system around them, to actually benefit them? You cannot and never will create a system and then put people into it, thinking it’s what they want and hoping for the best. That way drastic changes and sudden attempts to rectify problems become all too common. A flexible system is needed, one that places the ball with the students, especially when it comes to A-Levels.

Lower down the year grouping system, I can understand why this would be an issue. However if it’s and issue, again speak to the children who make it so. What are their wants for their future? Inspire now in order to re-generate interest in learning.

Perhaps this is just a reaction based on my reflections of my school life. Perhaps of most of it is rambling, but come the day I pick up my A-Level results, what will I have to show for my school days? OK, three grades on a piece of paper, but what is that without a belief that I enjoyed what I did, that it has helped make me who I am and that its done more than get me simply to university. Or should I say…the next step?

Simon Davies is a sixth form student at Lord Williams's School in Oxfordshire.