Sara Cox sits in

Sarah Joseph, editor of a Muslim lifestyle magazine

 Like thousands of others, our daughter will get her GCSE results this Thursday.

 She is rather stressed!

 My husband and I have tried to assure her that we know the work that she put in, we saw her effort, and that is what we value.

 However, it feels that we are fighting an uphill battle. Results seem so much more important now than they did 30 years ago when my envelope of O’Level results popped through my letterbox. There were pressures of course, but friends and I were musing over our sense that three decades ago there was perhaps greater room to fail.

 Of course, I’m not advocating failure as an education strategy, or a world where we don’t measure anything, where our children are cheered at every stage regardless, and there’s no encouragement for them to strive to be better. Indeed, I got brought up with the adage, “If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well” and I try and stick to that, striving to do anything and everything to the best of my ability. However, I’m rather fond of the GK Chesterton spin of that famous adage, “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly” he quipped.

 This is not an excuse for shoddy workmanship, rather it is a “have-a-go” philosophy. Think of something you want to do, something which you consider “worth doing”—learning to sing, playing the piano, playing tennis, or throwing a pot, for example—you’ll have to start somewhere, and you’ll probably not do them very well at first. Indeed, you may do it badly, but if it’s worth doing, it’s worth the risk of failure. And, if you persevere, you may get to the stage of actually being good. So, I guess this is why I am a passionate advocate of “daring to fail”, and picking yourself up, and dusting yourself down if do you.

 The idea of patiently persevering is one of the most oft repeated concepts in the Qur’an. Patient perseverance is linked to belief, to inner peace and wellbeing, to God’s companionship, to courage, and to ultimate success.

 So for me, as a parent, I am interested in hard work, and do hope my children all get the results they need in life. However, the character shown by daring to fail, and perseverance when someone does, is for me a far more important quality.