Storm, Stress and Algorithms: Youth in the time of Covid

I don’t have that many pictures of myself when I was 16. This is because I didn’t like posing for cameras. I wasn’t that sure about the way I looked; my life was a series of experiments. This is one of the rare pictures that does exist, and it is a cut out from a larger shot. Even though I appear to be looking at the camera, I wasn’t actually aware at the time that it was being taken. I was on my way to becoming what would be known at the time as a ‘New Waver’, not quite punk, and not quite Goth, but somewhere in between. I also wasn’t at all sure what I wanted to do with my life. I ended up going to college and taking a course that I did manage to pass in the end; but I realised halfway through that I didn’t want to spend my life doing the job for which it was training me. It wasn’t all bad though- a lot of the social experiences were fun, and I grew up a lot during that time.

My parents, who had previously gone through the days in which my older brother had grown his hair longer… and longer… and longer just sighed and generally let me get on with it. My father had been sailing on Merchant Navy convoys when he was 17, being shot at by U-boats, whilst my mother had been dodging doodlebugs in London’s Dockland. They were happy to let us have our very different, and from their perspective, far more tranquil youth.

In the end, I didn’t decide what I wanted to do with my professional life until I was in my late twenties, by which time I had three small children. It was then that I started my studies in Psychology that would eventually lead me all the way to a PhD. As my children grew past the early years stage I became a teacher, and worked with many sixteen to eighteen year olds who had very similar concerns to the ones I had at the same age.

Even in those days of the late 1990s and early 2000s, a culture had already begun in education that communicated to young people of that age that if they didn’t find what they wanted to do at this very early stage in their lives and quickly knuckle down to it, they would somehow be a failure. It greatly concerned me that this generation seemed far more pressured by societal expectation than I had been at the same age.

This became of even greater concern to me as the 2000s turned into the 2010s and neurobiology began to reveal that full neuronal adulthood did not actually begin until sometime around the twenty-fifth year, in particular that a considerable amount of ‘rewiring’ takes place in the pre-frontal cortex over the period of adolescence, creating heightened social and emotional vulnerability. Concerns about Exam Factory schools were increasingly expressed over the 20-teens, particularly when teenage suicide and self-harm statistics were considered.

Then as the first year of the 2020s unfolded, an entirely unexpected event intervened to greatly increase anxiety among the whole human race: COVID-19 and the subsequent lockdown, in order to reduce contact between people to reduce infection rates. Reduced social contact comes down extremely hard upon adolescents, programmed as they are to build their fledgling personalities in interaction with their peer group (be that hippy, new wave, goth or hip hop).

And then, education ministers gave them something else entirely to deal with. As sixteen and eighteen-year-olds were unable to take their end of programme exams, the government decided to apply an algorithm based on previous cohort attainment to teacher grade predictions. This has resulted in some baffling results, with some students, particularly those studying in large city-based institutions receiving significant downgrading, thus losing the conditional offers they had received from universities, making them feel ‘really useless and incapable.’

While this is not an uncommon feeling for young people to experience in what earlier generations described as the ‘storm and stress’ of adolescence, as they begin to chart a course for the as yet unmapped journey of their lives, it is not a feeling that we would expect an ethical education system to actually foster in the inherent ways that it operates. As such it seems baffling that ministers have not now acted to stop this speeding juggernaut, which is now on track to smash the dreams of the nation’s sixteen year olds in the middle of next week, when it is predicted that two million sixteen-year-olds will have their GCSE results downgraded.

Why would a nation choose to treat its young people in this way? When and why did we start treating our children in such a harsh and unyielding fashion? These are all questions that we need to deeply reflect upon as we start to build a Post-COVID-19 society. But in the meantime, why can ministers not prevent the downgrading of these young people who are not even yet old enough to leave education, and allow them to proceed onto their post-16 choices on the basis of the predicted grades that their teachers have provided? Do they value propping up a seventy-year-old exam system, which has widely been slated, even by members of their own government, as unfit for purpose above protecting the mental health and well-being of all the sixteen-year-olds in the nation? If this really is the case, we urgently need to look to what a dysfunctional society we have now become.