Students in Oxfordshire will collect their GCSE results tomorrow morning (Thursday, August 21) along with the rest of the country. 

Oxford Mail reporters will be at schools around the county bringing you live updates and speaking to students. 

This comes as a survey suggests that teenagers were withdrawn from their GCSE exams and missed class this year due to exam anxiety.

More than three in four (77 per cent) teachers and school leaders said there had been mental health issues related to exam anxiety among their Year 11 pupils this academic year.

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A poll, conducted for the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL), found that nearly two in three (65 per cent) school staff said GCSE pupils had not attended class this year due to exam anxiety.

The school leaders’ union has suggested that the “high-stakes” end-of-course exam model is causing “significant stress and anxiety” among students.

Other research suggests that teenagers who “perform poorly” in their core GCSEs tend to face worse health outcomes and are more likely to be engaged in criminal behaviour than their higher-achieving peers.

Pupils who fail to achieve a standard pass in their English and maths GCSEs face “dire” life consequences as the odds of success are stacked against them, a social mobility expert has warned.

Lee Elliot Major, social mobility professor at Exeter University and report co-author, has called for the policy of compulsory GCSE resits for pupils without a standard pass in English and maths to be reviewed.

In England, many students who do not secure at least a grade four – which is considered a “standard pass” – in English language and/or maths GCSE are required to retake the subjects during post-16 education.

A working paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, suggests that teenagers who did not reach this standard in their English and maths GCSEs had a “significantly higher” incidence of being stopped and questioned and to have been formally cautioned by the police compared with their peers.

Even when controlling for individual and family characteristics, these differences remained, it found.

Researchers from Exeter University and University College London (UCL) used data from the UK Millennium Cohort Study to track the lives of 11,524 pupils born in England in 2000/2001, who then sat their GCSEs in 2016/2017.

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This study examined the early life outcomes of pupils in England who did not achieve at least a grade 4 in both English and maths GCSEs at the end of Year 11 – which is around a fifth of teenagers – compared with their peers who did.

Those who did not secure basic grades in English and maths GCSEs were also more likely to report having a longstanding illness, behaviour problems, to have experienced pregnancy and attempted suicide.

“These results suggest that the high proportion of teenagers failing to secure basic grades in their key GCSEs is damaging not just for their education and job prospects but also for their future wellbeing,” the paper said.