How many GCSEs does a teenager actually need?

If you’d asked me this a couple of years ago, I would probably have confidently said: Eight to ten.

Not because I’d researched it. Not because I’d sat down and worked out exactly what my child wanted to do next. And certainly not because I’d found a rule somewhere that said every teenager must leave Year 11 with eight, nine or ten GCSEs, it was simply the number I’d absorbed.

Eight to ten GCSEs – That’s what teenagers do – That’s what Year 11 is for – That’s what you need to get into college – Right?

Where did the number come from?

I think this is one of those assumptions that is incredibly easy to make when your child is following the conventional school route. They start school, they progress through the years. They reach Year 9 or 10 and they start GCSE courses. They sit a collection of exams in Year 11 and somewhere along the way, the number of GCSEs becomes a measure of whether they’re “on track”.

Eight GCSEs.

Nine.

Ten.

Maybe eleven.

The more, the better or at least, that’s how it can feel. But once you step outside that very familiar pathway, you start to notice something, there isn’t actually one magic number that every teenager needs. What a young person needs depends on what they’re hoping to do next, which sounds obvious when you say it out loud. But, alas it wasn’t  obvious to me a few years ago.

The question I should have been asking

I was initially thinking about GCSEs from the wrong direction as I was asking: “How do we get enough GCSEs?”. Now I realise I should have been asking a slightly different question – “What does she actually need?” If your child knows they want to study a particular subject at college, or follow a particular career path, then you can start there.

Look for: What are the entry requirements? Which qualifications matter? Which subjects are useful? Are there particular grades they need? And perhaps most importantly: Does everything have to happen at the end of Year 11? Because that’s the bit I found myself questioning, why does everything have to happen at once?

One of the things I love about home education is that you can sometimes step back from the timetable and ask whether the timetable actually makes sense for your child. In school, there are obvious practical reasons why GCSEs tend to happen in Year 10 and Year 11 (and sometimes year 9).

You’ve got a cohort of pupils, a curriculum, exam timetables, teachers, classrooms, resources. There has to be some structure. But a home-educated teenager doesn’t necessarily have to organise their education around the assumption that everything important happens during those two years and that’s where things started to change for us. We didn’t have to cram everything into one enormous GCSE-shaped box, we could spread things out. We could take account of how she learns and what she actually wanted to do and we could let some subjects happen earlier.

My daughter took some qualifications earlier than the traditional Year 11 timeline. Travel & Tourism and Religious Studies were completed earlier, and History came later (in November of Year 11). Psychologically, it changed quite a lot. Instead of looking at GCSEs as one enormous mountain that had to be climbed in a particular two-year window and certainly a two month chunk of exams, we could see them as individual qualifications.

One or two subjects – and handful of exams, then move onwards which made the whole thing feel much more manageable. It also made me realise something.

There is a huge difference between saying “my child needs these qualifications” and saying “my child needs to do all of these qualifications at exactly the same time.”

Those statements aren’t the same.

But what about college?

This is where you need to be careful. I’m not suggesting that GCSEs don’t matter. Different colleges, sixth forms, apprenticeships, training providers, universities and employers can have different requirements. Some courses will require particular GCSE subjects, some will specify particular grades. English and maths can be particularly important and if your teenager has a very clear destination in mind, you need to work backwards from that destination.

That’s actually the point.

Don’t collect qualifications simply because you think you’re supposed to. Find out which qualifications your child actually needs.

If the next step requires a particular qualification, that’s useful information. If it doesn’t, perhaps you have more flexibility than you thought.

What if your child isn’t ready for ten GCSEs?

This is the bit I really want parents to hear.

Your teenager is not a failed version of another teenager because they aren’t doing the same number of GCSEs.

They might need longer, they might need fewer, they might need to take them at different times, they might need a different type of qualification altogether. They might be brilliant at something that isn’t reflected particularly well by a collection of GCSE certificates and they might not know yet what they want to do next. That’s okay too.

One of the problems with treating “8–10 GCSEs by the end of Year 11” as the definition of success is that it can make everything else look like failure. A young person taking six GCSEs becomes someone who is “behind”. A young person taking exams over several years becomes someone who is “late”.

A young person choosing a different qualification becomes someone who is “not doing enough”.

But perhaps we need to stop looking at the number and start looking at the person.

The question I’m asking now instead of: “How many GCSEs should she have?” I’m much more interested in: “What does she need for the life she’s trying to build?”

That’s a much harder question and requires research. It means checking actual entry requirements rather than relying on what we think we know and it means accepting that the answer might be different for different children. You also need to be willing to change direction. I’d rather ask a difficult question and find the right answer than spend two years chasing an arbitrary number because I assumed that was what we were supposed to do.

Maybe we need to rethink what “on track” means

“On track” is another phrase I’ve started to question. On track for what? School, GCSE results day, College,  University, employment? They are not the same destination so why would the route be identical? That is the beauty of what this last few years has taught me, there isn’t just one road – there are lots of them. So, do they need 8–10 GCSEs? Maybe, maybe not. The answer should be what does this particular young person need for their particular next step? Because once you stop thinking about GCSEs as a number and start thinking about them as tools, the whole picture changes. You’re no longer trying to collect as many as possible, you are trying to work out which ones are useful and that feels like a much better place to start.

If you’re interested in how we’ve approached GCSEs outside the conventional school timetable, you can read my original post: So they have to get 8–10 GCSEs by the end of Year 11, right?

Maybe I’m not the only parent who assumed that was simply how it worked.

Photo by Sumeet B on Unsplash