As misleading cliches go, those celebratory GCSE results-day photographs have to be right up there. For a lot of children – and a lot of parents – tableaux of happy, smiling teenagers, hugging each other in delight, are the final insult. These are yearly examples of the 16-year-old gold standard, the kind of child you must aspire to bring up. If your 16-year-old doesn’t fit in that picture, or had to be dragged into it, subjugated, resentful, kicking and screaming, then you, the parent, didn’t even scrape a C, let alone an A*.

A*-C grades in dramatic decline as GCSE results are published Read more

Results day, and the attendant hoopla, is insidious propaganda. It’s the day the media decide to portray most of Britain as one big public school, where academic excellence and clean hair is all that matters. Sure, there will be some heartwarming stories from a flagship academy. Sure, the occasional celebrity – Jeremy Clarkson, Kirstie Allsopp – will drop a tweet declaring that it’s not such a big deal: we didn’t cover ourselves in glory at school, and look at us now! Good on them. It’s a comfort.

But most of us know people doing rubbish jobs that they hate, feeling trapped and frustrated, a bit bitter, a bit beaten – and also know that things started going wrong for them when they were still listlessly dragging themselves through the best days of other people’s lives. Those photos of GCSE success are like a lot of things in our culture: sweet icing on a cake baked from fear.

Our children are taught to fear failure. They’re taught to feel shame. School is serious. Childhood is serious. There is little room for rebellion or mistakes, not much in the way of different routes or second chances. Few people really know at 16 what they want to do with the rest of their lives. Still, there they all are, choosing A-levels with a view to university. The high cost of higher education should logically mean that people take more time to knock about for a bit, deciding what they want to study and why. Instead, even a gap year is increasingly seen as “falling behind”.

Jeremy Clarkson (@JeremyClarkson) If your A level results aren't great, be cheered by the fact that I got a C and two Us. And I'm currently sitting in a villa in St Tropez.

Sure, you can tell your kids that their GCSE results don’t matter, that you’re full of love and pride for them anyway. But reassurances about “bad” results sound hollow, because parents have spent years doing what contemporary parenthood demands: motivating their children, insisting that they get “five good GCSEs including English and maths”, then three A-levels, then a degree – otherwise their life choices will shrink to nothing, and it’s-a-tough-old-world-out-there-you-have-no-idea.

The worst thing is that this is basically true. You need a degree now to get a job buying crockery online for an oligarch. I know a double-honours graduate who spends his days doing exactly that.

I wish I could say that I blossomed as a home-school mother. I didn’t

The paradox is that GCSEs/A-levels/university is now the sacred blueprint. Childhood and young adulthood are much less carefree, dominated by the building of strong foundations to bear the weight of the competitive world of work, with university both an important further preparation and a coveted means of keeping scary adulthood – in which putting a roof over your head looks like an impossible dream – at bay for a few more years.

Rebellion can be lonely. Even if you get a job or apprenticeship you like while still a teenager, your friends will more than likely be off in various cities doing studenty things, then home for the holidays – enjoying the sort of unstructured free time that doesn’t have to be up and out in the morning, with four weeks off each year.

Yet how to resist? It takes courage, deciding that your child just doesn’t suit the narrow demands and conventions of a highly regimented education. Even if you take that frightening leap, you’ll find that you’re on your own. I tried state, private and public school with my older son. The day I realised none of it was going to work was the day I pleaded with him to do some overdue English exercise that he could have knocked off in half-an-hour.

“Why won’t you do it? Why won’t you just get it over with?” I asked. He said he didn’t accept that some other person had the authority over him to demand he share his private thoughts, so that those thoughts could be judged. When your 15-year-old cottons on to the idea that school violates his human rights, the game’s up.

When your 15-year-old cottons on to the idea that school violates his human rights, the game’s up

I wish I could say that I blossomed as a home-school mother. I didn’t. Still in thrall to the “five good GCSEs” commandment, I signed my boy up for IGCSE correspondence courses with the National Extension College, registered him with a private examination centre, and set about the tedious task of nagging and pleading seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Basically, if you could get it on a DVD, I got it.

Two years and one maths tutor later, my son had a motley clutch of results that just about approximated the commandment. It was lonely, for both of us, and it wasn’t cheap. But he also learned to play the guitar, worked out that he wanted to be a musician, and convinced me he’d found his passion and path. It was the right thing to do, I’m certain. (Fairly certain. Time will tell.)

Some children just aren’t suited to the prescriptive “range” of schooling available in this country. While there’s some provision for those children, there just isn’t enough. It’s cruel and psychologically damaging to make miserable children jump through hoops anyway. But people without a couple of grand to spare (even though the NEC is very good value) just have to put their children, and themselves, through it all, gritting and gnashing their teeth, the start of every school day a battle. It’s an everyday story of courage in the face of adversity, and I salute all the families who’ve been there, however GCSE results day judged them.