Tomorrow, Thousands of Young People Will Receive Their GCSE Results. But What Exactly Are We Measuring?

Tomorrow, thousands of young people across the country will receive their GCSE results.

For some, there will be celebration. For others, relief. And for some, those numbers will feel devastating.

But alongside the congratulations, the photographs and the conversations about grade boundaries, I think there is another question worth asking: “How much can a set of grades really tell us about the young person standing behind them?”

I say that as an educator who absolutely believes qualifications matter.

GCSEs can open doors. They can affect the next course a young person takes, the college they attend and, sometimes, the opportunities available to them.

But they are still only one measure.

They don’t tell us how many times a young person nearly gave up but came back.

They don’t show the student who spent months struggling to attend school because simply walking through the gates had become overwhelming.

They don’t capture the young person whose needs were identified late, who spent years believing they weren’t clever because the way they learned didn’t fit the way they were taught.

And they certainly don’t measure every quality that young people will need in the world beyond school.

Where do we measure their ability to communicate? Their creativity? Their ability to solve a problem when there isn’t one correct answer at the back of the book? Their capacity to work with people who think differently from them? Their confidence to speak up in a room where they feel they don’t belong?

These aren’t “soft skills” sitting somewhere beneath academic achievement.

They are human capabilities.

And increasingly, they are the capabilities our young people will need as they enter a world of work being transformed by technology, AI and rapid social change.

Why I built the Academy

This is something I have been thinking about deeply while building Bamboo.

Bamboo started as 1:1 tutoring and learning support; helping young people, including many who are neurodivergent, catch up academically and build the confidence they’d lost along the way. But over time it became clear that academic support alone wasn’t enough. Grades were improving, but the young people in front of us still needed somewhere to work out who they were beyond the classroom.

That’s why we built the Bamboo Academy: a structured youth development programme, running alongside academic support rather than instead of it, built on three pillars: We Belong, We Grow, We Lead. It’s for young people who have struggled, whether or not they have a diagnosis; including the quieter kids, the ones with anxiety, the ones who look academically fine on paper but are still finding things hard underneath.

Because I don’t think the answer is to abandon academic achievement.

I think the answer is to expand what we mean by achievement.

A young person should be able to leave education knowing more than what they can remember for an examination. They should know something about who they are, what they’re good at, and how they respond when things go wrong. How to communicate an idea. How to collaborate. How to advocate for themselves. And, eventually, how they might use their strengths to contribute and lead.

Tomorrow, some young people will receive exactly the grades they hoped for. Some won’t. Some will take a different route entirely.

So perhaps one of the most important things we can tell them on results day is this:

Your results matter. But they are not the full measure of you.

And perhaps the bigger question for those of us working in education, youth development, policy and employment is not simply:

“How do we help more young people achieve better grades?”

It is:

“What kind of young people are we helping them become?”

Because ultimately, education isn’t only preparing young people for their next exam. We are preparing them for everything that comes after it.

Our Founding Cohort for the Bamboo Academy opens this September. If this piece resonates and you’d like to know more about how the Academy works alongside academic learning, get in touch or send us a message, I’d love to talk it through with you.

Until next time,

Jaya Narinesingh