Disappointing results not the end

One range of emotions closely followed by another, different, range of emotions. First thing yesterday a train travelling the first range would have left a station called extreme nervousness, bordering on fear, travelling through territories marked hope, to expectancy, and finishing up at a junction called supreme confidence, where only a few fortunate souls would have been found on the platform.

Within a few hours, the distribution of people along the length of the track would most likely have been fairly similar, though individuals may have moved stops, but the journey would have been one from despair, through indignance, ambivalence, satisfaction, and happiness, to unbridled elation.

Any time the massed ranks of a country’s scholars get their final results as high school students, it’s guaranteed the full gamut of possible emotions will be on display, because they’re big.

Yes, the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) includes students at Levels 1 and 2 who will still have another year or two left at high school, but for those who finished Level 3 last November, and their parents and caregivers, the two-month wait after the end of their schooldays for the verdict will have been particularly charged in early 2018.

Now the verdicts are in, and thousands are digesting what happened, and what it means for them from here. There will be some tears, some genuine fears, regrets at not having worked harder, some reassessment of options, some delight. It was ever thus.

So it’s appropriate to emphasise the message from the education sector in advance of their release, that NCEA results should not be a source of panic, for students or their families. It won’t mean much to those crushed by disappointment right now, but it’s true. The exams written two months ago were not an end point, but a start, a portal into a future beyond secondary education, into adulthood.

For some, outstanding results will smooth the path, bringing guaranteed places in tertiary programmes, and likely financial support too, as a reward for excelling academically at school. But that’s only for a few, and even for them, there are no guarantees of future success. More hard work awaits.

What’s ahead is an opportunity, and with fee-free tertiary education back on the table, it’s one available to more schoolleavers. Be disappointed, but then look forward. As Secondary Principals Association president Michael Williams said this week, there is ‘‘always more than one way to achieve the outcome’’ students who haven’t achieved the desired results want.

This isn’t the end. It’s a new beginning for every student. How the future looks for each of them depends far less on what’s already been done than on what they do from here.