- guardian.co.uk, Thursday 22 November 2001 17.12 GMT
A young girl comes home in tears and berates her parents for sending her to a "rotten" school. But the girl is at a very good school, so what is she upset about? She is upset because she has just discovered that her school's position in the league tables isn't high enough for her perception of success.
The trouble with leagues is that not everyone can be in the Premiership. Even though there are thousands of secondary schools in this country and the school this girl went to was probably in the top 5% in terms of exam results, its success was discounted. What mattered to her was to be in a school at the top.
An isolated case? Probably not. Some experts believe that exam mania could scar the emotional health of a generation of children because of its relentless appetite for high grades at almost any cost. A paper for the Institute of Public Policy Research published in the summer argued that high-achieving students could become success "junkies" and lose sight of themselves, only feeling accepted if they got straight As, while those who didn't make the exam grade could feel like failures.
The paper, Learning to Trust and Trusting to Learn by Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer, cited the apparent rise in eating disorders, burn-out, male disaffection and behaviour problems, even in the more academic schools, as signs that all is not well.
It argued that schools which focus too heavily on getting children through exams and pushing themselves up local league tables by hook or by crook risk damaging children's - and teachers' - emotional health and skewing broader educational objectives in the process. The latest official study acknowledges that one in 10 children aged five to 15 will experience a clinically defined mental health problem.
"I think there is a horrendous amount of pressure being put on young children, which is changing the nature of childhood," says Elizabeth Hartley-Brewer. "There is an unhealthy and neurotic perfectionism developing among children which involves a strong desire to avoid mistakes."
This can lead to children under-achieving to avoid the risk of failure and, she says, schools have to provide an environment in which children feel valued beyond delivering "success" to parents, the school or the government.
"When there is so much pressure and focus on doing well, children can feel they are only being valued for being successful, so they can become depressed if they are not.
"They are working for and trying to meet someone else's expectations. They end up with very little pleasure from their own work and they can end up losing the plot - burnt out or opting out."
Linda Blair, a clinical psychologist based at Bath University and a specialist in exam and grade stress, believes that at the heart of the problem is the lack of feedback young people get from the GCSE and A-level results and also the long delay between doing the exams and getting the results.
"We don't learn from results," she says. "We learn from feedback. If children only know their results, they only have half the story and the connection between their efforts and their results is not clear."
By doing this, she believes, society can be breeding a vulnerability to depression in later life and the child could turn into an adult suffering from learned helplessness - where they don't connect their actions with their results. She believes parents and teachers can help to relieve pressure by not telling the youngster what grade they think they are going to get. Instead, they should ensure the child is trying the best they can and studying the right things.
"Tell them that it is their effort that will win praise and give them permission to pursue the things that bring them praise and rewards and, if things do go wrong, show them they can learn things from that. You never learn less, you always learn more," she says.
Some leading education experts believe the GCSE system may have had its day anyway. The system is the heir to exams originally designed for school-leavers when many children left school at 16. With so many staying on to take A-levels and the government wanting to see half of school-leavers and young people go into higher education, their raison d'etre is diminishing.
Even schools that do astonishingly well in the league tables acknowledge this; some dislike them. Martin Stephen, high master of Manchester Grammar School, a highly selective boys' school where 86% of pupils get As or A* at GCSE, says: "GCSEs are increasingly looking obsolescent. The fear of failure we are seeing is the increasing price we are all paying for league tables because of the absolute failure to recognise that the degree of anyone's success is in achieving potential.
"The horrendous danger in our A-grade obsession is that we are imposing labels on plants that are still growing. I think league tables are a cancer on the face of education and the ultimate expression of the shop-window mentality."
