Preparing Parents

I spend the evening reading my daughter set questions in Spanish. I have a limited understanding of the questions I am reading out. Her room is strewn with books, folders and revision cards. It is the night before her first GCSE exam: Spanish speaking

Over the 25-plus years of my teaching career, I must have been involved in helping to prepare hundreds of pupils for public exams but this is the first time as a parent.

Her answers to a whole series of prepared questions, only some of which she will be asked in the following day’s exam, seem mostly fluent and plausible although I don’t really understand their content, much less how they will be judged by her examiner.

Occasionally, she stumbles over a question, becomes tongue-tied or lost for words. She laughs but only partly out of self-consciousness or anxiety. I am relieved to hear her laughter. She feels she has worked hard in the run-up to her GCSEs. She has certainly expressed this to us, her parents, many times. I believe her whilst reminding myself that sixteen year olds and adult professionals may define hard work differently.

This scene is not one of pre-exam domestic bliss – of a confident, high-achieving and well-prepared child with a pristine but balanced work ethic supported by her two teacher-parents cruising the highway towards stellar results. We have trodden the twisting and difficult path familiar to many families. It is unevenly paved by a great deal of angst – by encouragement, nagging and negotiation.

I feel reassured and proud – not for the grades my daughter will achieve – but for the sense of proportion she appears to have about these exams and their outcomes. She understands, I hope, that it is important to do your best and to achieve the best results you can but also that exam results do not define us as individuals.

GCSEs and other exams are hard but parenting is perhaps the hardest test of all – one in which there are no easy answers.