Children and young people are facing an uncertain future.

Decisions are being made by education bosses on a daily basis about what the rest of the school year will look like and these decisions are affecting students’ lives, both in the long term and short term.

Pupils in secondary schools across the country are being asked to switch from face-to-face learning to online and virtual lessons next week with no guarantee that they will be able to return to school later in the month as planned.

Jack Bracegirdle, who is vice president of the student council at Penketh High School, interviewed Robert Halfon MP before the Christmas break and asked the chairman of the Education Select Committee about the handling of next summer’s exams.

Here, Jack shares some of his thoughts about 2020 and the current educational limbo youngsters are faced with.

Starting 2020 midway through year 10, I felt quite relaxed about the year ahead and wasn’t really taking things as seriously as I should. It seemed like I had a huge amount of time before my GCSEs so didn’t really need to worry.

Ending 2020 midway through year 11 with the possibility of exams and all of the stress that comes with them, while in the middle of a global pandemic, wasn’t the easiest adjustment to make.

Earlier in the year, government guidance stated that people were required to isolate if they had any Covid-19 symptoms.

I thought this was brilliant as I got two weeks off school, at home, without needing to worry about school work. Just two days later, on March 20, all schools were closed and two weeks turned into six months. Although my school - Penketh High - did and indeed still are doing an incredible amount to keep the online learning going, it just wasn’t the same as seeing my teachers and my friends face to face every day. The national lockdown had taken away three and a half months of crucial penultimate GCSE year learning and the extra time at home gave me a lot of time to think. On a personal level, lockdown had a lot of positives for me.

When you’re stuck in a house 24/7, you learn who it is that actually cares about you and who you care about most. I really did leave the right people behind in 2020 and the past 12 months have somehow been the best and worst of my life.

Returning to school in September after six months at home was, without doubt, the weirdest thing I’ve ever done. It was like being in limbo - the time between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve - but this was for six months not five days. No one was ever really sure what day it was.

Finding out we had mocks just eight weeks after coming back to school took a lot of us by surprise as we had to treat them as the real thing. We didn’t know if we were going to sit any of our GCSES and this was the most distressing part - not knowing. Many year 11 students simply wanted clarity, which the school did everything they could to give us.

The subsequent stress of these mock exams affected a lot of students. I dealt with the situation well. I was in school every day apart from a two-week isolation period for the whole year, so it all felt quite normal. However, had we gone back to online learning before we started exams, it would have been incredibly hard to readjust back into that environment.

Fellow year 11 student Poppy Williams believes the readjustment has been difficult for some people but something that needed to happen.

Poppy said: “I found the return to school beneficial. School provides a necessary routine and social opportunities that most teenagers need. So, while Covid-19 has been truly tragic for the country, it has provided new insight for high school pupils. We know now how important school is to our daily life and future.”

What about the prospect of returning to school later this month? How will that work out?

Going back to school a week later than usual will mean we will be back to online learning from today (Monday). This means we have to cope with another change from in person learning to online learning and then back again. I don’t think that online learning is beneficial for most students no matter how you learn, however there are some advantages.

There is no chance of being distracted by other classmates! I would stress that the importance of face-to-face teaching is that it provides students with a structure that is so rarely seen in these uncertain times. Following a set timetable and knowing exactly how the day works is reassuring to many young people.

I strongly believe that the exams should go ahead in the summer and that every possible measure should be put in place to make sure secondary schools, if not just for year 11 students, are kept open as much as they can. It’s hard to think that five years of learning and progress could all come down to a predicted grade or an algorithm.

Many of my fellow students feel strongly that they wouldn’t want to be known, along with last year’s year 11s, as the teenagers that got everything handed to them. Let us sit our exams. Give us a chance to achieve our goals.