I was really interested in this thread as my godson went through a difficult time when he finished his final year at primary school last year due to the pandemic and now his sister (my goddaughter) is going through a similar experience as she is due to finish high school this year.

I thought I'd give her a quick phone call to ask her how she was feeling about it all and it went like this:

Emily* 15
"It's kind of sad really - they say that high school are the best years of your life and it's been cut short. We've been told we'll go back to school soon - but will we actually go back? Either way, it won't be the same. I feel sad that this is the way our high school life is ending. I've lost contact with a lot of people as I haven't kept in touch, but if I was in school I would have seen them and said 'Hi'. School is the thing that brings us all together. With our GCSE's, it feels really unfair how we're being treated. One minute we're being told we are definitely doing them and the next we are told we're not doing doing them. We get told we have to revise 'just in case' and it's so hard and stressful not knowing where we stand. We feel messed around and even the teachers don't know what's going on - they just tell us "we know as much as you do." GCSE's are the biggest exams we'll sit and the grades we get are important for our future so we need to know how this is going to unfold. We don't know if prom will go ahead or not. We have been told that it's not been cancelled yet but even if it does go ahead, it won't be the same if we're all in bubbles and we don't feel as close to each other as we did because we've been apart a lot. People might be isolating and have to miss out on prom because someone tested positive in their bubble/family. Our school decided to do our school year photo before Christmas because we just didn't know how things would look in 2021 and whether we'd even be in school. I'm so glad I was there for the photo, but so many were missing because they were self-isolating. It's so sad that they missed that as they'll never get that opportunity back."

*Name has been changed to protect anonymity.