Newspaper coverage of A-level results day? It's a failing grade

Every year it's the same: Tedious reminiscences mixed with the familiar argument that university is only about how much money you might make.

Previously: Bonfire of the hot-dog suits
The media is doing everything it can to make sure it doesn't shoulder any of the blame for the culture that fostered the race riots.

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A few unavoidable traditions are observed every A-level results day: Newspapers scaremonger about grade inflation, front pages feature dubious pictures of young women jumping for joy, and Jeremy Clarkson rolls out his yearly tweet reminding everyone he got a C and two U-s followed by a different boast. (This time, it’s that he’s opening a pub.)

Given that newspaper audiences are increasingly senescent, most of the students who’ve received their grades today won’t even be remotely aware of what’s being written about them. The advice offered in the features pages and strident opinions bubbling over in the columns will only reach them second-hand via older relatives who are still susceptible to passing off what they read as their own thoughts.

The top lines of the news reports focus on the number of top A-level grades “despite [them] being expected to return to pre-pandemic levels”. That’s one of those angles produced when there’s a gap between what editors and experts ‘reckoned’ might happen and reality. Of course, The Daily Telegraph manages to put the most negative spin possible on the figures (Top A-level results hit record high despite efforts to curb grade inflation).

Once you know what grades your child has achieved, the papers are there to tell you whether they’re actually any good. The Telegraph has a tool to let you see not only if they’re kept up with the Joneses but with Joneses across the nation. Meanwhile, The Times inevitably has a guide to clearing if their results were better or worse than they expected.

And you don’t need to rely on boring any young people in your life with stories about your A-level results either. The Telegraph has trawled for readers’ stories, leading with one from a man called Kevin who failed A-level Physics but now has a business that turns over £14 million a year. That he sat his exams 42 years ago is treated as a mere side issue. If that doesn’t work for you, there’s a bloke who became a diplomat and another who now earns £160k a year and didn’t do A-levels at all. If there’s one lesson to be learned here it’s that whatever your results, there’s a decent chance you’ll find something to boast about if you work at it for a few decades.

The Times opts to marshall a collection of its columnists to offer advice about going to university. James Marriott — who uses his weekly column today to muse on the popularity of A-level Psychology — warns that it might not be as fun as everyone says it will be; Susie Goldsbrough advocates the benefits of spending lots of time lazing around doing nothing before Hugo Rifkind advises the exact opposite (“I wish I’d done more work.”); Harriet Walker goes for advising students to be themselves, and Robert Crampton says they shouldn’t try to be perfect. The common denominator among the columnists in that feature? They all went to Oxford or Cambridge (and all but one of them mentions it).

Dame Helena Morrissey also pops up in the Telegraph with tips for parents based on having witnessed 7 children so far get their A-level results (with two more to come). It might be worth considering that her experience as a so-called “city superwoman” with nine children might be a little different from the norm. One useful insight she does offer though is how much the goalposts have shifted over the years that her kids have been going through the exam system (“…the goalposts have shifted many times, with what feels like ever-changing grading methods and boundaries and of course the approach to teaching itself, from 100pc books to virtually none.”)

If none of that advice does the job, you could always subject yourself to the latest episode of the Telegraph’s Daily T podcast where Camilla Tominey (University of Leeds) and Kamal Ahmed (also University of Leeds) debate whether university is really worth it. We’re subjected to variants of that argument every year and they would be shut down a lot quicker if the speakers were asked what they’d like their children to choose rather than being allowed to burble along rhetorically.

Inevitably, one of the papers’ biggest angles is which degrees make you the most money. Another interactive tool from the Telegraph offers to predict future earnings based on course and university while in the Times comment section, James Kirkup reheats the familiar call for education to produce more useful economic units. He’s right to raise the issue of “lost children” who don’t go to university and are failed by the other options, but that neglect starts long before high school and is about a lot more than having the right ‘skills’ agenda.

None of this coverage would get marks for originality. Any examiner would suspect that there’s been rampant plagiarism and more than a little over-reliance on past papers. While columnists and reports alike focus on the dominance of STEM subjects and the financial rewards of studying them, the degrees that most of them studied — the humanities and the social sciences — are being shut down or stripped for parts. Surely that deserves a few more column inches?

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