I agree very much with Les in that most of the students do work very hard and that getting a high grade is not the simple thing that the media likes to make out.

I do believe, though that 'the system' is entirely wrong. Because the government has this mad objective that some 50% of people should go to University, most employers insist that their staff should have degrees whether it makes any sense or not. That means young people have very little choice but to try to go to University whether it suits their nature or not, and they are well aware of the need for the high grades.

In my day it was a major struggle to get into University at all, by definition: there were far fewer places. Correspondingly, employers only insisted 'O' levels in English and Maths so there were many more openings for people who didn't want to go to University.

For those who did try for University, after that very severe competition if you did reasonably well, life was much easier; when I left Uni I had seventeen job offers in my hand to choose between.

Now, it's much easier to get to a University becaused there are many more places, but all that has achieved is to move the struggle to the end of the process rather than the start and to oblige people to go who would, in my day, have left and found a job around 18 (or even 16). And the other thing it has achieved is to force many young people to start life with a massive debt, of course.