Worried About Your GCSE Grades? Here’s How to Stay Calm and Plan Ahead

Published 17th July 2025

Introduction

Sleepless nights? Moments of wild panic and breaking out in a sweat when you think of that fateful August day when you’ll receive your GCSE results? Maybe you imagine a less-than-happy day when you open that envelope.

You’re not alone. It’s likely that every single student in your year has felt or will feel the same. Yes, even the lad who has been receiving 100% in his tests all year. Yes, the girl who loudly asserts every day that she doesn’t care – she has a job lined up anyway.

Whether you’ve already taken your GCSEs or not, worrying about your future is completely normal at this pivotal moment in your life.

Although it’s easier said than done, please don’t.

Here are some top tips to help you keep calm.

Before the Exams

If you are lucky enough to be reading this before the final exams (perhaps you have just taken your mocks), then you have time on your side. You still have control over the outcome of the exams.

Feelings of anxiety and stress often result from a loss of control, but you can improve your GCSE grades.

• Start GCSE revision early, using an exam timetable to make sure that you spread your revision evenly across all subjects.
• Complete past papers to ensure you know the format of the exams and the questions you’ll answer. Ask a teacher or tutor to mark your work so you have feedback on how to improve.
• Use revision books – most exam boards publish specific books for the exam you’ll be sitting.

Stay Calm

Both before and after the big exams, you should, for your own health, try to stay calm about your GCSE grades.

1) Stay Positive

There is every chance that you will achieve the GCSE grades you require, and all of this pacing, hair pulling, and these sleepless nights will feel needless afterwards.

When it gets difficult to be positive about the GCSE grades, try thinking of other things in your life that are going well that day – this could be from the large (a new part time job or a holiday you have booked) to the very small (the sun is shining or you really enjoyed that doughnut you treated yourself to this morning).

2) Get Perspective

These GCSE exams, though important, do not define you. You are a valuable human being with many skills and abilities that cannot be examined. So, while you wait for GCSE exams, go out and remember that love of the outdoors or your kindness towards others. Enjoy it!

It’s also true that your GCSE grades are unlikely to figure highly in how you reflect on your life when you’re sitting in a rocking chair, aged ninety. Therefore, you should see GCSEs as a stepping stone to other bigger successes. Whatever the results, you can, at age sixteen, make a success of your life.

3) Use Relaxation Techniques

Methods like deep breathing, listening to white noise, yoga and listening to hypnosis tracks can help you to overcome those naughty negative thoughts. Headspace has an app that can help you with mindfulness, meditation and help you to get to sleep.

4) Exercise

Whether that’s running, swimming, walking or a team sport, getting your blood pumping is great for increasing endorphins and serotonin.

5) Forget About the Exams

Worrying about your GCSE grades won’t make the results magically improve.

There’s no point obsessing over an essay you know you could have done better on if you’d just [insert excuse here – you’d revised more/ your arm wasn’t aching from writing/ you hadn’t been off in year ten when you studied it].

Therefore, once you have put your pen down after the final exam, try to move on. Have fun this summer: go out with your friends; watch a film or ten; sleep in. Do all the things that you denied yourself in the run-up to exams.

Plan Ahead

Whilst it’s important to release the past when you’re waiting for your GCSE grades, you start to plan for the future.

1) Talk to Your Adults

Chatting to people who have been through all this will help you to consider what you will do next in any given scenario. Try not to obsess about success or failure. Instead, think about different pathways to the future you want.

It may be that there are multiple routes, college courses, and apprenticeships that you can take. It may be that you have more than one option for what you’d like to do next. It may be that you still don’t have a clue. Wherever you are in that decision-making journey, talk it through and let others help guide you.

2) Get Ready for What Comes Next

It isn’t too early to begin preparation for A-level, BTEC or whichever course you plan to do next year. Get a head-start on reading for your course, or work with a tutor to help you with key skills you may need next year, which you know you found difficult at GCSE.

It may be that you need some help with essay writing skills or problem solving, or that you know certain areas of maths or science passed you by. Use the lazy summer to fill those gaps.

3) Consider Resits

If you do need to resit an exam, make sure you know how that would work. The more you know about the days and weeks after the GCSE results day, the more in control you will feel and the easier staying calm will be.

Conclusion

So, don’t panic. It achieves nothing, and this time before results day should be a window of opportunity for you: an opportunity to enjoy the freedom of enjoying the present and an opportunity to get yourself ready for the autumn term.

Now, grab your running shoes, or your popcorn, ready for a trip to the cinema, and enjoy your summer!