With all the trends to have come from the A Level results – students doing better in science and maths subjects, pass rates dropping, record numbers of people going to university – there’s one visual trend you’d be blind not to notice. And that’s the fact that so many of the pictures accompanying all of these stories are of gleeful young blonde women jumping for joy as they get their results.
It’s not only that boys aren’t doing well – this year, 52,000 fewer of them are going to university than girls – it’s just that pretty girls shift more papers, because girls are pretty objects, you see.
Because this has been going on for ages – so long that there was a dedicated website to the skew of how A Level students are represented on results day. SexyALevels.tumblr.com closed in 2012 after four years. Though, as it turned out, sexy A Levels is such a thing that, ‘Twitter has it covered. The hashtag #sexyalevels covers all bases.’
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Finally, this year, there seems to be a bit of a kickback against it, with The Guardian putting a photo of teachers – men and women – jumping for joy on the front of their paper, and The Times putting a picture of triumphant boys leaping in the air.
However, the bullshit remains, as one school exploited the beauty of two girls at its institution by sending out a press release to papers boasting about the ‘very photogenic’ twin girls, who both had conditional Oxbridge offers.
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King Edward High School for girls in Birmingham allegedly had the press release written by a freelancer, The Independent reports, and it was meant to showcase the academic achievements of the girls to papers so they could send photographers and reporters on the day to cover it. The publicity, we’re guessing, would get more young people applying to the school.
However, anticipating that papers like to put photos of pretty girls in their pages, they sold the girls for not just their predicted grades and commitment to CV-boosting extracurricular activities, but their looks.
‘The identical twins Jenny and Carrie Soderman, 18, from Solihull look likely to have won Oxbridge places and scored excellent results.
‘Jenny had an offer from Oxford, Carrie from Cambridge. Both are very photogenic.’
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The release then detailed that the girls each got 11 A*s at GCSE and are ‘outstanding sportswomen’.
We’re just surprised that whoever wrote the press release didn’t just attach a photo of the girls!
Maybe, as we take away loads of learnings from the statistics of A Level results day, certain parts of the media could do well to remember that if someone does exceptionally well in their A Levels, they totally deserve to be given national press coverage.
But maybe the way students look shouldn’t be exploited to help sell more copies, even if papers think it sells and even if schools think papers will think it sells. After all, you can’t always guarantee that students who might have been totally wracked with nerves just hours previously would look their best by the time they get their results.
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Picture: Getty
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.