The Unspoken Question: Can Exam Systems for Young People Ever Be Fit for the Real World?

All client material is anonymised

There are moments in my work that stay with me, not because of the intensity of what is shared - though often that is part of it - but because they expose, with heartbreaking clarity, the dissonance between the world we say we are preparing children for, and the world they are actually living in.

This was brought home to me again recently when a teenage client of mine was sitting major threshold exams during a period of political unrest and violence in her country. 

She is an extraordinary young person - bright, articulate, and determined - the very qualities that any exam system, whether its A-Levels in the UK, the International Baccalaureate or SATs in the US, presumably aim to recognise and reward. The kind of student these exams claim to be designed for; someone poised to demonstrate their “best”.

And yet, she found herself struggling to concentrate, blaming herself for not performing as well as she had hoped. So many months of preparation - weekends at home instead of with friends, late nights, endless revision notes. And it was with all of this on her shoulders that she opened our conversation, filled with disappointment with her performance.

What is really important to make clear is she did not come into the session seeking comfort or perspective. Not at all - these things could not have been further from her mind. In fact, she was frustrated with herself; disappointed that she had, in a few of her exams, “bottled it”. She kept repeating how she did not understand why she just had not been able to concentrate; genuinely unable to explain this to herself. So accustomed was she to living in political unrest, it simply had not even occurred to her that the events happening around her - events so completely normalised by their frequency - might have something to do with it.

Over time, as we spoke, something shifted. She began to connect the dots.

She slowly began recounting the events surrounding her exam days. One exam had been paused due to the sound of gunfire. Another that went ahead despite drone strikes. Another conducted as a nearby town was being bombed. These were not abstract anxieties. This was the physical and emotional ground she traversed to get to the exam hall every day.

Her story sits with me not just because of her extraordinary resilience (to which she was completely oblivious), but because it reveals something deeply uncomfortable about the systems we have built around education and achievement. The standardisation that allows an exam board to mark a paper from one side of the world alongside another from a completely different context is, in theory, a nod to fairness. Yes, concessions are made when ‘circumstances’ arise - but can they ever really balance those particular scales? Can any adjustment account for the psychological weight of sitting an exam under the threat of violence?

‘Fairness’, when divorced from context, becomes something else altogether. There is an inherent blindness in it. We can see these things, we acknowledge they are there, yet we shrug at the imperfections of the systems we create and say we will do what we can.

But what actually CAN we do?

What this experience brought to the surface for me is not just about policy. It is about culture - the culture of exams, the culture of performance, and the quiet collusion many of us, unwittingly or otherwise, take part in when we act as though children are blank slates entering neutral spaces. They are not. They arrive with histories, with burdens, with lives shaped by war, by poverty, by racism, by instability. Yet we ask them to produce, perform, excel - as if those forces do not exist.

What do we do, then, when survival itself requires compartmentalisation? When self-awareness might be destabilising, and yet, without it, a young person ends up internalising blame for things no child should have to shoulder? Those of us working in the therapeutic sphere know this dilemma all too well. To what extent should one attempt to dismantle defences when a child has no choice but to cope with the circumstances they are living in? Yet we also understand that these defences can impact quality of life - undermine friendships, romantic relationships, one's future capacity to function in the workplace.

These are not theoretical questions. They play out in therapy rooms, in classrooms, in bedrooms where teens revise for exams while listening to sirens or enduring other painful adverse circumstances behind closed doors.

It makes me think of another client I began seeing when he was fifteen. Only recently, now in his twenties and no longer living at home, has he been able to speak about the emotional abuse he experienced growing up. He said something that has stayed with me: “I could not let myself really see it until I knew I could leave.” That is survival. That is wisdom.

Gabor Maté writes that “trauma is not simply what happens to you, but what happens inside you as a result of what happened to you.”

And that inner landscape - how it is shaped, how it is protected, how it is navigated - is not always visible. Nor does it follow the timetables set out by educational institutions.

Sometimes therapy needs to be about naming what is true. Other times it is about quietly holding space for someone to keep going when the truth may be too heavy to bear. It is not always immediately clear which path to take, and at times that can leave one feeling quite powerless. But more often, it feels like a profound  privilege - to be trusted with these stories, to witness the quiet unknowing heroism that to some is just daily life which all too often goes unseen.

There are days when I sit with all of this - the brutality and the beauty, the contradictions children and young people must hold - and I can’t help but wonder: Whilst I fully believe and appreciate the value of education, how can we also expose children to its ever increasing pressures if it cannot also reckon with the same world those children and young people live in?

I understand that is largely a rhetorical question.

We can only educate with the tools we have. But it so often feels as though we are forever discovering - often too late - why those tools, as embedded and institutionalised as they are, more often than we care to acknowledge, are not truly fit for purpose.