I've Watched DSE Year Destroy Children. Here's What the Families Who Survived It Did Differently.

By Mrs. Lau · 15 November 2025 · 7 min read

I taught secondary school English for eighteen years. For most of that time, I taught S4 through S6. In the last six years of my career, I was also a year head, which meant I saw the families as well as the students — the parent emails, the counsellor referrals, the calls from parents who did not know what they were asking for but knew that something had gone wrong.

I want to write about what I observed over those eighteen years. Not the aggregate data — Miss Fu writes the clinical analysis far better than I could. I want to write about the specific patterns I saw in families, from a front-row seat, over nearly two decades. The families where DSE year was hard and survivable. The families where something actually broke — the student who stopped speaking to their parents for two years, the hospitalisation in April, the student who had the results but was not okay, in ways that took years to understand.

I should say at the outset: I got things wrong as a teacher. I am not writing from a position of having handled this correctly. I am writing from a position of having seen a great deal, including my own missteps, and having had many years to think about what the patterns actually mean.

What "Something Broke" Actually Looked Like

Before I describe what helped, I should describe what breaking looks like. It is not always acute. In fact the acute crises — the student who had to leave school in March, the hospitalisation — were, in a terrible way, the cleaner version because they were visible and required an immediate response.

The harder cases were the ones that looked like DSE year going normally. Students who completed the year, sat the exams, received their results, and then simply stopped functioning. The student who could not leave her bedroom for three months after results day, not because the results were bad but because results day ended the only identity she had maintained for two years and there was nothing behind it. The student who began university and dropped out in November, having spent the whole of October sitting in the flat doing nothing, and who when I eventually heard about it had been quietly suicidal since July.

These students were often the high performers. The ones the system appeared to be working for. The breakdowns came after, when the pressure that had been used as load-bearing structure was suddenly removed.

The Patterns I Observed in Families Who Got Through It

They ate dinner together. This sounds too small to be useful, and I understand if you read it that way. But in the families where DSE year was survivable, there was almost always a meal that happened together, at a table, where the conversation was not exclusively about the DSE. It was the reliable structure that reminded both the student and the parents that the relationship existed outside of exam performance. I observed the opposite in families where things went badly — meals eaten separately, at different times, food left outside closed bedroom doors, the family having functionally dissolved into individual units, each managing their anxiety in isolation. The shared meal is not about nutrition. It is about maintaining the existence of the thing that cannot be recovered once it is gone.

They had a decision about the tutoring load, and they stuck to it. The families who survived DSE year had made, at some point before S6 began, a deliberate and explicit decision about how many tutorial classes, how many hours of external preparation were appropriate. They had thought about it as a family and committed to it. They did not keep adding. They did not respond to every piece of parental comparison intelligence from WhatsApp groups by adding another Saturday class. The families where things went badly were often the ones who kept escalating in response to anxiety — more tutoring, more practice papers, more weekend revision classes — until the student's week had no structure except preparation and the student had no sense that anyone thought there was anything to them beyond their exam performance.

The parents stopped reading the marks. I mean this specifically. The parents who were present for DSE year but not destructive had, in most cases, made some version of an internal agreement to reduce their own engagement with interim grades. They were still engaged — they knew broadly how things were going, they were available when the student wanted to talk — but they were not cross-referencing every test score against class rankings or calculating what was needed in each remaining subject. The students could feel this. The students whose parents were tracking every mark could also feel that, and the experience of being constantly monitored and evaluated was a weight that made everything harder.

They had a conversation about what happened if the results were bad. This is the one that surprised me most when I understood its significance. The families who were most intact after DSE year were families where, at some point, the parents had directly and honestly said to the student: if the results are not what we hoped for, we will deal with it together, and you will still be our child and we will still love you and it will not be the end of your life. The students who had heard this — really heard it, not as a platitude but as a statement their parents believed — were measurably more resilient when things went wrong. They had not staked everything on the outcome because their parents had not communicated that everything was staked on it.

They called the school counsellor before the crisis. I want to be specific about this. The families who called the school counsellor when they noticed something — not when it had become undeniable, not after three months, but when they first had a concerned feeling about their child — those families consistently had better outcomes. The counsellor is not a last resort. The counsellor is a resource, and like most resources, they are more effective when used early. I watched parents delay making that call for months, hoping the student would improve, worried about what it would look like, worried about stigma, worried about whether they were overreacting. In almost every case, earlier would have been better.

What I Got Wrong

I was a teacher for eighteen years and I was not always handling this correctly. I want to be honest about that.

I sometimes treated students who were struggling as preparation problems rather than human problems. I noticed a student producing worse work and my instinct was often to adjust the academic support — different past papers, different revision strategies — before asking whether the student was all right. This was a failure of both vision and priority. I could see the grade. I could not always see what was underneath it.

I also participated, in ways I am not proud of, in the institutional pressure architecture. I taught to the exam. I marked harshly, believing that harsh marking in advance produced resilience for the actual examination. I am not certain that is true. I think I sometimes produced accurate simulations of examination conditions without producing accurate simulations of the support that should surround those conditions.

And I did not, often enough, say directly to struggling students: you are more important than your results. I said it occasionally. I did not say it enough. The institutional environment makes it feel like saying it undermines the seriousness of the preparation. I believe now that the opposite is true — that students who know their teacher sees them as a person, not a grade trajectory, work harder and more sustainably than students who feel they exist primarily as exam candidates.

The One Practical Thing

If I could give families of S6 students a single concrete instruction for this year, it would be this: once a week, have a conversation with your child about something that is not the DSE. Not as a strategy for managing their stress — as an honest interest in them as a person who has opinions and experiences and a life beyond their examination. Ask about the book they mentioned months ago. Ask about their friend whose name keeps coming up. Ask about the song they had on repeat last Tuesday.

The student who knows they have a self that extends beyond the DSE is the student who survives DSE year, and also survives what comes after. Building that self is not a distraction from the work. It is the work.