For the last ten years I’ve been in a university call centre, supervising call handlers and taking calls from parents and students. The job was to confirm successful applicants too scared to believe it had happened, direct suitable candidates to courses that were still in clearing, and kindly but efficiently direct those who’d missed their offer to keep calm and move on.

Before that, I spent many results days in the school library as Head of Sixth Form, without doubt the most intense day of the school year as results were handed out. Of course you’d know the results the day before, but that didn’t necessarily mean you knew who you’d be congratulating and who consoling. Some who’d missed their offer by grades would arrive beaming, having been emailed by their first-choice uni that they had a place anyway. Others who’d affected nonchalance all year and refused to apply to UCAS would arrive heartbroken and dejected. It was an exhilarating and terrifying task to find something honest and useful to say to them all.

Back again, results day would start in the staff room as an A-level teacher, doing the thing every teacher does whether they admit it or not: scrolling down a spreadsheet, looking for “my” classes, feeling every single grade like it was partly mine.

Three different roles, three different perspectives on the same morning. And from all three, it looks much the same: a room full of teenagers who, for a few hours at least, would feel their value amounted to no more or no less than the letters or numbers on a piece of paper.

I know I’m not the only one today thinking about what those grades actually tell us; and what they don’t.

What a grade actually measures

Goodhart’s Law is worth knowing if you don’t already: when a measure becomes the target, it stops being a good measure. Applied to education, that means something specific: if we care more about the grade than about the learning it’s meant to measure, we’re prioritising the system itself rather than the students. Grades were only ever meant to represent their progress: a proxy, a snapshot taken on one day, under strange conditions, standing in for something far bigger and far harder to capture. Results day doesn’t treat them as a proxy, though. It treats them as a verdict.

There’s a further problem, and it’s only getting sharper. The ability to recall data, facts, or information matters less now than it ever has. Anything that can be memorised can also be googled. What’s genuinely rarer and far more useful are adaptability, curiosity, critical thinking, or the ability to keep going when things get hard because they inevitably will.

Confidence, emotional maturity, kindness, leadership, the capacity to collaborate, and self-regulation under pressure aren’t peripheral qualities. They’re what most determines whether the grades contribute to the future a young person actually deserves or not. The OECD has published research indicating that students with stronger social and emotional skills tend to reach better educational outcomes and lead healthier, happier lives.

Yet none of that is reflected on a certificate. Moreover, when the pressure on grades becomes really strong, teachers, parents and students can even forget they were even part of what education used to, and should, mean.

A system working against itself

It isn’t only that schools and colleges don’t properly teach social and emotional skills; in most cases, they’re hidden in a few RSHE sessions. It’s that the system, in important and persistent ways, actively suppresses them.

Consider what a “good student” is trained to be: compliant, quiet when required, good at following instructions and meeting deadlines. There’s nothing wrong with any of that in isolation, but they are most definitely not the characteristics of a good learner. A good learner asks inconvenient questions, pushes back, follows their curiosity where the syllabus didn’t intend, and takes ownership of what, how, and when they learn. Self-direction and obedience are arguably mutually exclusive, and a system built to produce the second is, structurally, working against any notion of producing the first.

The Holocaust survivor, Edith Eger, writes in The Gift that our greatest obstacle is rarely what we don’t know. It’s the limits we’ve quietly internalised about our own abilities, and the belief that someone else is coming to rescue us from the hard part. A system built on compliance trains that belief without ever intending to: wait to be told, wait to be marked, wait to be rescued.

I want to be part of the conversation about what this means for young people and what we can do about it. This is the real argument behind The Independent Learner. I’m not against grades themselves, but against a system so fixed on the measure that it has lost sight of what the measure was created to represent.

What actually helps on a day like this

If the grade itself isn’t what determines how well someone comes through today, what is?

David Yeager’s 10 to 25: The Science of Motivating Young People points to something that shouldn’t be surprising: what actually sustains teenagers isn’t the outcome, the career or the prizes in front of them, but rather status at home and at college, respect from their peers, teachers and loved ones, and a personal and intrinsic sense of purpose. Behind all three, agency. Motivation is created by the sense of being at the steering wheel, rather than being managed, nagged and graded.

Music teachers, sports coaches, and others who work closely with young people tend to understand this instinctively. They coach much more than techniques and skills. They help develop emotional regulation; they advise how to control adrenaline, nerves and tension as a matter of course. They guide learners toward realistic, positive self-talk. Not by pretending the work is easy, but by helping students anticipate the pride of achievement.

And, above all, they teach that there’s no shortcut: that a skill becomes a habit only through consistent, repeated practice. Much of that practice happens when the learner is on their own, making the effort with no one supervising, micromanaging or cheerleading. Dance teachers and judo instructors know that self-efficacy comes from self-belief proven over time. They aren’t character traits but skills that have become habit.

We don’t expect a teenager to drive a car on their seventeenth birthday without lessons. We wouldn't expect them to move out and suddenly know how to do their laundry, plan a food shop or cook for themselves if those things have always been done for them. So why do we expect something different when it comes to learning? A young person whose education has been as passive as having a plate of food appear in front of them three times a day will not magically become an independent learner when they arrive at university or start their first job any more than they will suddenly know how to budget, shop and make a healthy meal for themselves.

Social and emotional skills, like life skills generally, can be learned. Independence is not a personality trait but a set of skills that are developed through practice.

So what can we actually do about this?

I have developed a simple tool built for exactly this moment, called the Open Fist. It’s available for free on my website, thusky.co.uk, and I’d urge you to give it a look. It brings together five skills I know to be teachable, which help to:

• reset your attention

• regulate your feelings

• relax your posture.

In a calmer headspace, you can then reframe your thinking before reactivating in a better mindset. The skills aren’t actually difficult, but they do need practice because the habits of stress, overwhelm, and avoidance are usually deeply ingrained.

What matters more immediately on a day like today is easier than any technique: a shift in what you say. Not “how did you do,” but “how are you doing.”

Not trying to manage the outcome, but helping your teen process it, whatever it turns out to be. That’s our task: not fixing the result, but helping them respond to it.

One practical point is worth stating plainly: no one needs an instant decision on results day. Clearing runs over several weeks. Confirmation and insurance offers are deliberately made with room for reflection. Finance, accommodation, access arrangements.. all can be worked out without rushing the decision. There is time to think, and time to breathe, however urgent things feel.

That time is worth using to separate two things that tend to be conflated on a day like today: what a grade seems to say about who someone is, what they’re capable of, and what’s now possible for them — and what it actually says, which is how a series of assessments taken several months ago went.

Viktor Frankl wrote about the space between what happens to us and how we respond to it, and argued that our real power lives in that space. That is exactly where parenting, tutoring, and coaching happen; not in the result itself, but in what comes after it.

After three roles and thousands of versions of this same conversation, what I’d say to every student results day is: the grades don’t tell the whole story.

How much they matter has far more to do with the weight we give them than with the letters or numbers themselves.

Your teenager doesn’t need rescuing from today’s result. They need help learning that they can rescue themselves. That’s the whole task — today, and every day that follows it.