GCSEs: Reflections on the Covid generation
Watch as we look back through our Covid archive as three women reflect on GCSEs during the pandemic.
Students in Cumbria are reflecting on receiving their GCSE results having suffered two years worth of disruption to their studies.
The Covid pandemic saw long periods of disruption, isolation and strange rules for students who are receiving their GCSE results this year.
Although social distancing and bubbles are now a distant memory, for these students it was a fact of life for their exam years.
Meabh McGrath, GCSE student, explains the challenges she faced during her time at school.
She said: “Instead of just getting on a bus, you have to make sure the internet is working, that no-one else is on it. I have little space between my desk and my bed, so it's not great for sitting at for long periods of time, so a full day there is not the best.
"Each form got given a classroom, and you were in that one classroom all day, every day. So you didn't move around the school at all. And then each group had a zone outside that they had to stick to. And you had your own toilets for a year group: one toilet cubicle for an entire year group. It just limited all your social interactions massively."
Meabh also explains how the limited social interactions affected her relationships with her friends.
She said: "We weren't as close, me and my friends, afterwards, but you could see who was like close friends with you because only a few number of people would ever have the motivation to message anyone."
Meabh's mother Sarah explains how much covid impacted young people, especially when things were meant to go back to normality.
She said: "There almost was a nervousness for the young people to see one another again. As we were coming out of the pandemic to start with, we had a big tent on our front garden and tried to get friends around to interact a little bit and there was definitely a reluctance there."
There was also a significant impact to teachers, whose jobs and lives were impacted as a result of the pandemic.
Natasha Marshall, teacher and head of sixth form, explains how she missed some aspects of her job.
She said: “It made me really miss having a staff room, being able to have access to people for support. I think some of that sometimes is a bit taken for granted that it did have an impact on staff too.
"If you can put your hand up and discreetly ask something in a lesson that's very different to having to put on the chat function on teams very visibly to everybody that you're struggling with something."
Natasha said that she noticed a major impact on pupils when they returned to school.
She said: "There was a massive difference in them when they came back. Changes in behaviours. I think a lot of them had got very used to only interacting through screens.
"I think sometimes they can be a lot more confident when they're not having to see someone face to face, and then they're dealing with maybe the fall out with things that they said when they came back in. They were using their phones to access lessons. They were on them constantly. Trying to kind of wean themselves off having constant access to to their phones.
“You can't underestimate the importance of the formative years of secondary school, where you learn to get into routines; you learn what the expectations are. And they didn't have that.
"Obviously now they've come through their GCSEs, they've had loads of pressure piled on them to get through those, and that's definitely something that we'll have to think about into sixth form and preparing them for the next steps, whatever they might be."
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