This month, as the pressure of exam season builds, the same messages start swirling through schools. Young people are told to stay calm, dig deep, and be resilient. They need more grit, better coping strategies, more stamina for what lies ahead. It sounds reasonable. It can even sound caring. But this is where the problem begins. As Paul Gorski’s work makes clear, when we respond to harmful conditions by asking children to become tougher, we are slipping into deficit ideology, locating the problem in the young person instead of in the system producing the pressure. As worry and anxiety take hold, young people are forced to face what many have been taught to see as a life-altering storm, one that will sort the worthy from the disposable.

Why do we create the storm?

Before we can talk about “fixing” the stress, we must ask: why do we create it? Many have bought into the myth of meritocracy, the belief that exams are a neutral, fair way to determine a child’s worth and future. Drawing on Tamara Bibby’s work on fantasy and anxiety in education, we can see how schools sell a fantasy of certainty: the lie that GCSEs will “set the future for the rest of your life.” Anxiety is at its greatest in the realm of fantasy and the unknown; to offer these myths as absolute truths is extra damaging. As Pierre Bourdieu argues, exams often function as a form of “Symbolic Violence,” a mechanism that validates the cultural capital of the privileged while alienating those the system has marginalised. There is a total disposal of those without “academic value”; if you don’t have it, you have no value at all.

If we consider Class 13’s principles first, affirming full humanity, critical thinking, community and fostering democracy, we would move away from these harmful experiences. Instead of asking, “How do we get them through the exam?”, we would ask, “How do we protect their humanity while they navigate this system?”

Clinical evidence allows us to rebuff this meritocratic stance. A longitudinal study published in The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health (Guo et al., 2026) found that academic pressure is a “potential modifiable risk factor” for depressive symptoms and self-harm, with effects persisting into early adulthood. Research by Young Minds found that nearly two thirds of 15-18 year olds struggled to cope in the run up to GCSEs and A-levels: 1 in 8 young people self-harmed or felt suicidal in the run-up to exams, a quarter reported panic attacks, and two-fifths said their mental health worsened.

When we ignore this, we engage in what Dr. Bettina Love calls “Spirit Murdering.” The slow erosion of a child’s soul through an obsession with data. We aren’t “preparing them for the world”; we are triggering survival instincts that inhibit the pre-frontal cortex, the very part of the brain required for the complex thinking exams actually demand.

Much like Michael Moore exposed in Sicko, we are acting like insurance adjusters. We wait for the breakdown to occur before we offer “care.” When we send in a specialist to offer CBT to a child who has stopped attending, we treat their mental health as a repair job, patching them up so we can send them back into the same toxic conditions. This isn’t an intervention; it is a post-mortem of a failed environment.

We must be honest: educators help to shape this exam season pressure. We hide behind a “shield” of local context, saying, “You don’t understand our kids, 70% are on Free School Meals, 30% have SEND. This is why we have ‘high expectations.’” Schools frame this as a commitment to standards, but it treats the lived realities of communities as justification for the status quo, rather than the very reason why we must design a more nurturing, regulated system. When we use countdown clocks and cancel staff training because “it’s exam season,” we pedestalise exams over humanity, signalling to young people that our care for them is conditional on the summer term’s results. Young people once labelled as sweet and compliant suddenly disappear from the register because withdrawal is the only logical self-safeguarding act left.

The Eye of the Storm

As we enter this high-stakes exam season, we invite you to pause and look at the “hammer” you’ve been asked to swing. If we acknowledge that the pressure we are applying is a “modifiable risk factor” (as The Lancet study suggests), then we must also acknowledge that we have the power to stop. It feels like “not doing your job.” But if our job has become the “Spirit Murdering” of young people, then perhaps the most radical professional act is to refuse.

Ask yourself:

Am I containing anxiety or projecting it? When I demand “one more mock,” is it truly for the sake of this young person’s humanity, or is it a defensive practice to soothe my own fear of “underperformance”?

Can I disrupt the “Banking Model” today? Instead of “depositing” more exam techniques, can I offer a 5-minute Regulation Break? Can I affirm a young person’s other qualities regardless of their predicted grade?

Who am I serving? In this moment, am I serving the Meritocracy Myth, or am I serving the human being standing in front of me?

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