Under UK Labour education secretary Bridget Phillipson, GCSE exams are set to get easier. Last week, it was reported that a review of England’s school curriculum has found that ‘intensive, high-stakes’ assessments are impacting the ‘wellbeing’ of teens. A poll commissioned by the review discovered that half of pupils who completed their GCSEs last summer found it difficult to cope with stress during the exam period. It now seems likely that the exams, sat by 15- and 16-year-olds, will be made simpler and fewer to protect pupils from the supposed scourge of stress.
This has naturally sparked concern from those devoted to maintaining rigorous academic standards. After all, the point of exams is to assess how well students perform under pressure. Cutting back on exams and simplifying the content will be just another stage in the ongoing dumbing-down of the national curriculum.
What should be of even greater concern is the way that children today are having normal feelings and experiences medicalised. Of course, pupils have always found examinations stressful. But it is only recently that this stress has been turned into a medical problem we need to protect children from at all costs. As I explained in my 2003 book, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age, children are continually subjected to a narrative of illness that ‘does not simply frame the way people are expected to feel and experience problems – it also constitutes an invitation to infirmity’.
This is why we see figures such as the ones used in the report. According to these dramatic, headline-grabbing stats, there is an epidemic of exam-related stress in schools these days. Schoolchildren are, apparently, suffering under unprecedented pressure due to the burdens of schoolwork. Back in 2019, the NSPCC reported that, within a 12-month period, the number of students who raised concerns about exam stress in counselling sessions had increased by a shocking 200 per cent. No doubt, if that report were published today, the numbers would have risen by some 300 or 400 per cent.
This supposed epidemic of ‘exam stress’ and other school-related anxieties is far more likely to be the outcome of pathologising children’s ordinary experiences, rather than reflecting any real increase in classroom pressure. When children behave in ways that veer away from the norm, we no longer call them unruly or troublesome, but give them a medical label. Children who really hate going to school might have a ‘phobia’. Pupils worried about exams are diagnosed as suffering from ‘exam stress’. Emotional responses to everyday experiences have been rebranded in therapeutic language.
Unsurprisingly, over the past 30 or so years, children have internalised elements of this narrative, readily describing their experiences with psychological vocabulary like ‘stress’, ‘trauma’ and ‘depression’. Writing in the 1940s, sociologist Robert Merton characterised this kind of development as a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. That is, the assumptions and beliefs about people lead them to behave in ways that confirm those assumptions and beliefs. Tell children that they will suffer stress, trauma and depression when enduring certain experiences, such as exams, and many will. Stewart Justman similarly describes the way in which this expansion of medical diagnosis invites people to feel ill as the ‘nocebo effect’.
Once children are instructed to perceive what was once regarded as everyday unhappiness through the language of psychology, they are likely to adopt the role assigned to them. This narrative does more than give them the language to describe their feelings and emotions – it actively invites them to be unwell. That is why being unwell has become such an integral part of many people’s identities today.
This pathologisation follows children into adulthood, too. Also last week, it was revealed that students with ADHD at Oxford University are given 25 per cent more time on exams without even having a formal diagnosis. How long before the educational establishment calls for abolishing all exams on the grounds that everyone should be insulated from stress?
Far from helping them to manage their ‘stress’, coddling kids like this will teach them nothing – except that they are incapable of dealing with any kind of pressure. This culture of fragility is raising a generation of victims.
Frank Furedi is the executive director of the think-tank, MCC-Brussels.
