I didn’t leap for joy when I got my exam results – but that was mainly because, despite going to an all-girls school, there were no press photographers present.
Times have changed of course. These days we often wake up the day after the grades come out to see five lads a-leaping unconvincingly across our front pages alongside their female classmates.
Cheesy photos aside, times haven’t so much changed as intensified.
Within hours of pupils learning of their A-level results, statisticians had calculated that the gap between private and state school grades is `the widest in the modern era'.
The record-breaking results saw nearly 45 per cent of A-level entries across England, Wales and Northern Ireland awarded A or A* compared with 38 per cent in 2020 and 25 per cent in 2019.
And, following more than a year of learning disrupted by school closures and Covid-related self-isolation, those teacher-assessed grades have disproportionately benefited those at independent schools where the proportion of top grades rose nine percentage points to 70 per cent, compared with six percentage points elsewhere.
The gap has also widened still further between the general student cohort and black students and boys, who both continued to receive lower grades.
The gender gap is at its highest level in a decade for A* and As - 46.4 per cent for girls and 41.7 per cent for boys, with girls overtaking boys for the first time in Maths.
In Northern Ireland, the problem of academic underachievement has become a stain on us all, with assembly figures showing almost 30 per cent of school leavers did not achieve the benchmark of five GCSEs at grades A*-C or equivalent.
It was jarring to hear European Commission vice president Maros Sefcovic last month earnestly extol the benefits of the Northern Ireland Protocol to MLAs.
Time and again he returned to the “world class universities” which he implied were churning out the perfect employees for an EU-facing global NI.
Like so many before him, Mr Sefcovic was conveniently forgetting the narrow proportion of people in this region that applies to.
Here the proportion of students on free-school meals failing to reach the GCSE benchmark is 50.5 per cent.
One would have thought, considering where the protests to the protocol are emanating, Mr Sefcovic would have been familiar with the figures that show just over a third of Protestant boys on free-school meals achieved the benchmark, compared to 46.7 per cent of their Catholic counterparts.
According to the Equality Commission “school leavers entitled to (free-school meals), particularly Protestants, notably Protestant males, demonstrate persistent underachievement and lack of progression to further and higher education”.
Of course it’s probably a bit much to expect a diplomat - who has no doubt been sold a halcyon picture of Northern Ireland by business and political leaders desperate for much-needed inward investment - to grasp a nettle that the same political and business leaders have themselves failed to.
One must also wonder what will become of all the teenage girls who this week managed to achieve academic excellence even as their world has locked down around them and the future of their planet burns before their eyes.
As white, male TV presenters remind us every year with their humble-brags about how they succeeded despite their exam failures, we do not live in a meritocracy.
Political commentator Marina Purkiss remarked wryly on Twitter: “I got two As & a B at A-Level, I got a 1st class degree, but I was working class & state schooled so I didn’t walk into a top job. Instead I landed an entry level job paying so little I got into debt trying to live & work in London. Any Eton lads out there experience the same?”
In three months a careful calculated date will again mark the day when women effectively stop earning until 2022.
That day will come earlier for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic women who are paid even less on average.
I’m sure they have been just thrilled to be reminded – again - how little their hard work and good grades mean in the `real world’, Jeremy.
