She finished her AS-levels recently and has been feeling the pressure of the exam season.

Exams are finally over and you would think its time to relax and enjoy the summer.

Well, in a way, it's less hectic now but by no means all over. With another year to go and the teaching for A2 starting the day before the exams finished, everything is back on track again.

Hopefully this will all stand me in stead for the A2 next year, and the hopefully to university (as this was my original plan for going back to college).

I think the exams didn't go too badly this time around. The physics one was a lot easier than I had anticipated (I was dreading it).

Media, I think I did okay on, maths I may have to re-sit some next year, but mostly OK and computing was fine.

Given the amount of pressure on you to do well in these exams, I wonder how on earth some of the younger people will be coping with something that even now I can only just manage.

Teachers never like to tell the children that in the greater scheme of things Sats don't actually matter one bit to them January 03 article October 02 article

Exams are all part of going through school. To have exams at the end of GCSE, or even the Sats was nothing major because there were a load of end of year exams at school, so it was just one more.

The thing that teachers never like to tell the children, though, is that in the greater scheme of things SATS don't actually matter one bit to them in their life.

The Sats are there for the government to see if the teachers are doing okay and to see where things are falling down.

It's not a mark against the pupil, but the teacher, so there should be no need for revising and cramming whether you are taking the ones when you are six or 14.

The education system in England used to work perfectly fine, and then people decided to try to fix some non-existent problems and you get the nice shake-ups that happen ever few years.

The A-levels moving to AS and A2 was a decision that a lot of people regret as it leads to not enough teaching time and people missing out because there is not enough time to teach the interesting things, just the stuff on the checklist.

The exam season is over

Now they are talking about changing the GCSE exams to this style as well?

The latest idea for changing A-levels is to have some of them become compulsory, which defeats the point of them really.

At 14 you are supposed to be able to decide which subjects you enjoy and so will take through to GCSE, but you are not allowed to drop the ones that you don't like - so this has failed.

At A-level you are supposed to be able finally to escape those subjects that you can't stand doing because, for whatever reason, they bore you.

But then they have general studies that everyone is expected to do, and now?

Now there is talk of compulsory A-level subjects as well.

When are you deemed old enough to know what it is you would like to study and don't get useless figures shoved down your throat by people who seem to think that everyone in the world cares about politics and economics so they all will study it, regardless of whether they are studying art?

Oh well, I am sure the government know what they are doing. They can sit there with their degrees that taxpayers' money went into, while they take away more and more of the fun and magic of education.