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In about 10 minutes from now, over half a million young people will get their GCSE results. I wish them much success and strength. As someone with dyslexia, at school, I received an alphabet soup of results that I probably couldn’t even spell at the time. Luckily, it’s harder to spot my dyslexia now as I’m often saved by spellchecks, but I clearly remember the almost physical taste of humiliation, the feeling of being incapable, the total lack of diagnosis and the school’s view that I was just incompetent, a dunce, rather than neurodiverse. I’m grateful that neurodiversity of all forms is increasingly recognised, although we’ve got a long way to go. GCSE’s and A’ levels have come under fire this week as the Tony Blair Institute suggested ripping them up, stating that they leave students ‘poorly prepared for work’. Instead, they state that education should focus on 4 C’s - critical thinking, creativity, communication and collaborative problem-solving to give pupils the skills for a world shaped by automation and artificial intelligence. This chimes with what a headteacher explained to me that current school leavers will have five careers, three of which haven’t even yet been invented. We need a system that brings emotional literacy and resilience as well as cognitive literacy – a capacity to navigate possible 18% inflation, climate change and all the anxieties that these are rightly evoking in our young people. Maybe we could rename GCSE’s as standing for Growing Competencies in Skills and Emotions. The Talmud, insists we teach our children four things – Torah, meaning learning and literacy; help them find them a life partner – teaching them how to make lasting relationships; educate them in skills for work – so they have a craft, a trade, a profession. Lastly, it adds that we must teach children to swim – independent survival skills so they don’t drown which faced with physical and emotional challenges. Literacy, relationships, work and survival. Today, in these last few minutes before GCSE results, Proverb’s universal wisdom may help all of us challenge and expand experiencing exam results as a reflection of a young person’s total worth. It states, ‘teach children according to what each of them needs’ – each of us is so different, excels in wildly different ways, some of these will be recognised appropriately by the numbers of a GCSE scale, but many won’t and it’s our privilege to continue to educate young people as they receive their results that these results are important but that they themselves are far more important than any number.