Across the world this month, hundreds of thousands of students have taken a deep breath, opened envelopes or refreshed exam results screens, and (hopefully) celebrated years of hard work finally paying off.
Some will have secured places at their first-choice university. Others will have exceeded their own expectations. Many will simply feel relieved that months of uncertainty are finally behind them.
Those achievements deserve to be celebrated.
Examination results matter. They reward knowledge, discipline, resilience and sustained effort, and they open doors that might otherwise have remained closed.
But once the celebrations are over, schools, parents and employers are left with the same question: what do those results tell us about the young person behind them?
The answer is: quite a lot. Just not everything.
For generations, examinations have helped reduce uncertainty about what students know. They give universities, employers and families confidence in the knowledge and understanding students have acquired.
But it is no longer the only uncertainty education needs to reduce.
Over the past year, I’ve spoken with school leaders across the UK, the Middle East and Asia. Whatever curriculum they follow, the conversations have been strikingly similar.
Nobody is arguing for lower academic standards. If anything, expectations are rising.
What many are asking instead is how to give students more opportunities to demonstrate what they can do with what they know. It’s a subtle distinction, but an increasingly important one.
A student who achieves an outstanding grade in science has demonstrated impressive knowledge and understanding.
But whether they can apply that knowledge to an unfamiliar problem, communicate their thinking clearly, collaborate with people whose ideas differ from their own, or adapt when the brief changes halfway through a project – these are different questions.
They aren’t new questions – they’re questions that traditional examinations were never designed to answer. That doesn’t diminish the value of examinations. It reminds us of their purpose.
The ability to exercise judgement, communicate effectively, collaborate with others and apply learning in unfamiliar situations is becoming more important
Knowledge remains fundamental – arguably more so now that artificial intelligence can access and generate information almost instantly. Students need a deep enough understanding to question, interpret and apply what AI produces. But knowledge itself has become less scarce.
The ability to exercise judgement, communicate effectively, collaborate with others and apply learning in unfamiliar situations is becoming more important. And increasingly, those are the capabilities that help young people distinguish themselves beyond their grades.
That’s why many schools are beginning to think differently about evidence – not because they want fewer examinations, but because they want a fuller picture of each student.
We’ve seen this play out directly.
The International GCSE Global Skills Projects, which we help deliver with OxfordAQA as its teaching and learning partner, was built on exactly this premise: a qualification designed to assess what students can do with their knowledge, not only what they know.
Its first cohort – spanning thousands of students across our first group of ‘Champion Schools’ and marking the first non-examined future skills GCSE in history – starts this coming term.
It doesn’t answer every question raised here, but it is evidence that the idea can work in a live classroom, not only in a conference hall.
Students are not simply demonstrating what they have learned; they are being asked to apply their knowledge, communicate their thinking, work with others and respond when the problem in front of them doesn’t look exactly like the one they practised.
These capabilities matter beyond the classroom too. The OECD’s 2024 analysis of employer-reported skill gaps found that problem-solving and teamwork were among the skills firms most frequently identified as lacking, and employers increasingly assess for them directly – often through multiple stages of interviews and practical tasks, not simply once someone is in the job.
The Global Skills Project makes this tangible. In its group sustainability action project, students apply research to develop a sustainability action plan, allocate roles and work collaboratively to deliver it.
They are then assessed on their individual contribution to the project – creating evidence of how they plan, research, collaborate and respond to a real-world challenge, rather than simply what they can recall in an exam.
The schools making the greatest progress aren’t choosing between academic excellence and capability development.
They’re recognising that the two reinforce one another. Strong academic foundations give students the confidence to tackle complex problems, and applying knowledge in real-world contexts can deepen understanding in ways that classroom learning alone cannot.
As students return for a new academic year, it’s worth asking what success will look like when today’s AY27 Year 13 cohort collects its results 12 months from now. Of course, we hope they’ll achieve the grades they’ve worked so hard for.
But perhaps we should hope for something else too: that, alongside their grades, they will have learnt to lead a team, navigate uncertainty, solve a problem they haven’t seen before, and turn knowledge into action.
Those experiences won’t replace examinations. They’ll make the results mean more, because the purpose of education has never been simply to produce impressive transcripts – it’s to develop young people who are ready to contribute, adapt and thrive in a world that continues to change.
Academic achievement will always matter. The opportunity now is to make sure we also understand what sits behind the grade.
Because when a student opens their results next summer, the most important question shouldn’t only be what they achieved.
It should also be what they can do with it.
