There’s nothing wrong with a cliché – taking into account several provisos. Is it apt? Is it perceptive? Is it well expressed and succinct?
William Henry Davies – from a poor beginning in Wales, a sometime resident of Sevenoaks, the original ‘Super-Tramp’ drifting across America – shows poetic genius in Leisure, the oft-quoted poem. Summer, the holidays, provides the opportunity to stop, to stand, to stare: at what we see; where we visit, near or far; above all, to stop and stare inwardly. Time to reflect.
School, college, university are done – for the time being. Children and teachers take a break. Don’t let anyone tell you a teacher’s life is just holidays interspersed with terms: it’s a demanding, sapping job. Heads, no less: budgets, HR, H&S, regulation, inspection, endless emails. All deserve a break. Time to reflect.
And what of busy, working parents? You have your children home – hurrah – time to spend together. Juggling work and family time can work. Hopefully some proper, uninterrupted time off – a holiday. The Blackberry started it; now those little ’phones have it all. Are we really expected to be on call all the time? Put them away, just as you tell the children.
For many, August will be spent waiting for those exam results to drop. It used to be the brown envelope; now it’s an email or going to school to get them in person. There’s nothing to be done between exams and results and here’s a cliché of which I am not so fond: ‘It is what it is.’
The results when they come will, ideally, be cause

for celebration. Congratulations! Or ‘the curate’s egg’: good in parts. For some they may be cause for course correction: options reduced, limited or even taken away. Was it the lack of preparation, inadequate revision, the wrong questions or just a bad day at the office? Yes, there will be time to chew over the reasons but where forward-looking options are concerned it is necessarily a time for action; for positive thinking and decision-making.
Experience shows what may initially feel to be a second choice should arguably have been the first. Was there too much ambition? Was there unrealistic expectation? It is considerably better to start and rise rather than falter and fall. Consider the options open to you whether it is A Level or IB choices, university clearing or maybe a gap year to reflect and reposition.
Talk to the school. They have the experience and knowledge. Your situation will certainly not be the first. Avoid the temptation to blame (it is what it is…): find the best way forward, constructively, collaboratively. Disappointment will be felt by all parties.
Returning to W. H. Davies, we can admire his determination and resilience. From criminal youth to vagrant, traveller and poet, associating with prominent figures in the arts world in the early twentieth-century, his is a tale worth admiring, a model worth following. The closing lines of Leisure say it all:

‘A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare’