To complain to school about announcing GCSE results?

[Rachel178]

DD1 is 15, almost 16, and is taking her GCSEs this summer. She is, and always has been, extremely clever, and should do very well.

However, she attends a top ultra-selective private girls' school where the pressure to get straight A*s is, in my opinion, ridiculous.
(long story - she went to state primary, her headmaster advised us to try for a scholarship at this school for secondary, she ended up getting a huge scholarship making it affordable for us)

The key worry DD has is that the school award a 'prize' to every girl in the year who gets at least 9As; when their GCSE certificates are awarded in assembly, it is read out who got this prize and who didn't, so everybody knows whether you got 9As. A list of the 'prize'-winners is also published on the school website and in the school magazine. About 2/3 of the girls achieve this every year.

DD has started having weekly panic attacks and nightmares about GCSE results - in her mind, the results that would be a disaster and utterly humiliating would be 8As and 2As, because then 'everybody would know that I hadn't got 10As'.

To me, the sort of school where 8A*s and 2As is synonymous with failure is not a healthy environment. I massively regret sending DD there now.

I know I'm not going to be able to get the school to change the 'prize', but would I be unreasonable to speak to them about the sort of pressure they're putting on their students?

I would definitely try to build her resilience (relaxing, exercising, blowing steam, whatever it takes) as this kind of reaction at this point in the year could escalate. It's not nice. It's likely to be her own ultra-high standards and sense of perfectionism, as much as the school's behaviour, which are driving the panic attacks. Poor girl.

I would second the posters who say your DD would feel under pressure wherever she is at school. I also sympathise as My DD is exactly the same and she is at a very ordinary state school. We are currently going through the same thing with A levels.

However, to the posters saying exam results are a matter of public record, they aren't. You can choose not to have your child's exam results published in the local paper.

I also agree with pp who have said that as a bright, sensitive child your dd is likely to put pressure on herself wherever she goes unless she learns not to. One of the most enlightening things a therapist has ever said to me was that if I stopped being a corporate lawyer and became a librarian, I would be the world's most stressed librarian! I needed to change me!

Also, please, please don't make your dd change schools for A-level if she doesn't want to! All the girls who left my private girls school for either the very good sixth form college or a boys school that took girls in sixth form messed up their A-levels! They spent so long settling into a new school and making new friends, they forgot to work!

Seems bonkers. I got a few As, mostly As, and one B at GCSE. I got three (not four) As at A-level. (This was before A-levels had A grades). And I got into Cambridge.

Sure, a string of A*s is an awesome result, but it's not the be-all and end-all.

Forget reading out the results in assembly. My DD’s were put in the Times.

To me, the sort of school where 8As and 2As is synonymous with failure is not a healthy environment*

Yup!

Can you get some therapy working on resilience and calming techniques?

the sort of school where 8As and 2As is synonymous with failure is not a healthy environment*

I agree to a point, but I'm sure there are many other wonderful things about the school. I think that we do our children a disservice when we tell them that if something makes them uncomfortable, that thing should be different than it is, or they should run away. It gives them the message that they are too fragile to handle real life.

During the teen years we have a unique opportunity to help our children develop inner strength so that they will be ready for the next phase of their life, in which we play a very minor role. To do that, we have to believe they are strong enough to handle less than perfect situations. If we see them as poor babies who need us to rescue them, we fail them.

It gives them the message that they are too fragile to handle real life.

Except that the school is giving them a very false impression of real life - because in real life a mix of A*/A/B will get you pretty much everywhere you want to go without being made to feel a failure. And the teen years for girls are also a time when self esteem can be extremely fragile. So why not build up their confidence to handle life, rather than pressurising them so much that they crack.

Does this not happen at every school? It was normal at my school 25 years ago. Although there were no A* then, only As.

Our school published a results book every year of every pupil's public exam results. were