Looking ahead the prospect does look brighter in a number of ways, and its not just that the sun has finally reappeared following the recent bout of anticyclonic gloom that has cast a pall over the first weeks of the New Year. I travelled out to a careers fair at another school for the first time for ages last week, and it was a refreshing experience to once again talk to a wide range of young people from different backgrounds about their plans for the future. It did feel a little odd though as after such a long period where ‘unnecessary’ mixing of humanity has been avoided, now to stand in a big hall with rivers of students flowing past over the course of the day, some shy, some curious, some self-absorbed but also some super confident. Lots of youngsters with heaps of potential, and I do hope that some of those who came to say ‘hello’ at the stall join our Year 12 in due course.
Looking around my sixth form private study class as I write very few are now wearing masks, and I suspect that is partly because the supplies at home may be running low. Masks are still very much in evidence below Years 12 and 13 however, and that is where there is the need; a normal sized room with 32 teenagers squiggling around in it is a very different prospect to working with the boys and girls of the sixth form. Though the absence rate is low in Year 12 there has been a further increase lower down, and we are now up to over 50 students in total isolating (or around 5%). There will, I am sure, be more yet to come but the tide appears to be turning.
On Monday we will get some of the granularity of how GCSE and A level exams will work this summer in the different subject areas. The success of the national vocational and technical exam session in January, at the very height of the Omicron Wave, demonstrated the practicality of the exercise. It seems pretty certain that exams – real exam papers – will be sat by candidates once again across the UK, and that’s a good thing in my view. My conversations with BWS students suggests that the vast majority share this view. They want the milestones to gauge how far they have to go along the road, and they want the certainty of assessment at the other end. Year 13 were not stress-free in January, but they now have some evidence to check against their university offers, and I am sure that they will rise to the challenge as they always do. The journey through to the late summer should very be exciting then, and that’s especially true for the first group of BWS girls at A level. I can’t wait to see how they all get on, both boys and girls…
SDS
