KATE TURNER and her friend Laura met while studying for their A levels at Skipton Girls High School in North Yorkshire. They have similar interests, mix in the same social groups — and were both predicted to achieve good grades and to sail through the university admissions procedure.

Each girl comes from a supportive family and, until midway through their sixth-form education, had clear ideas about her career: Kate’s ambition was to become a teacher or journalist, Laura’s to be an English teacher.

But the pressures of being overexamined and the strain of an ever-increasing workload have forced the girls apart. Kate survived “a nightmare two years” and is heading to Newcastle University this autumn; Laura has decided that enough is enough. Like many of her peers, she has abandoned the education system after suffering stress and exhaustion.

Kate says that all of her sixth-form year group buckled in one way or another en route to taking their final exams last summer, having been tested to their limits by the demands of their education. They queued to speak to counsellors as their workload became intolerable.

“We started 2000 with 100 pupils in our year, but nearly a fifth of them had dropped out by 2001,” she says. “I have friends who suffered from depression and eating disorders, and even one who tried to take an overdose because of the pressure. She eventually left the sixth form because of it.”

Her experience is far from rare. Today’s 18-year-olds have been the guinea-pig generation: Key Stage tests were inflicted on them at the ages of seven and 11, and they were the first to be subjected to the AS “pass as you go” module. This new system requires students to take four to five subjects, each worth half an A2 level, in the first year, and then to choose three as full A2 levels in the upper sixth. Fifty-hour weeks, just to keep up with coursework, are not unusual, aside from any extracurricular sport or music, and increasing numbers of sixth-formers are withdrawing their university-places applications well before they complete the courses.

Kate says: “There were times when I thought about giving it up because I was so tired. But I thought, well, I’ve got this far, I may as well plug on. I need a degree for my chosen career. But I could never have faced more exams, at university, this year.” Her parents agreed that she needed a year out before taking up a course next autumn.

Laura took an alternative route. “After the first year I was getting panic attacks and I had lost more than a stone,” she says. “My doctor suggested antidepressants. I couldn’t carry on. The pressure was relentless. I gave up sport and the dance classes that I’d been going to for seven years. I kept bursting into tears and couldn’t stop. I thought that nothing was worth this much unhappiness.

“I spoke to my parents about it. They could see what it was doing to me and encouraged me to give up my studies and take time out before finding a job. I’m not sure what I am going to do yet, but I know that I have made the right decision. I couldn’t bear the thought of being that depressed for another three years at university.”

In a study of almost 3,000 14 to 18-year-olds, by Oxford University researchers for the Young Voice charity, 86 per cent of girls named schoolwork and exams as the biggest source of stress in their lives.

More disturbingly, recent research for the Royal College of Psychiatrists by Dr Mike McClure, a consultant adolescent psychiatrist, found that every sector of the population showed a decline in the number of people willing to take their own lives, except teenagers. The steepest rise in suicide attempts is now among 15 to 19-year-old girls.

Last June a 17-year-old, Louise Kitching, sparked a national debate when she fled the exam hall at William Farr CoE Comprehensive School, in Welton, Lincolnshire, and broke down in tears, unable to face her fifth exam paper in a day with only a ten-minute break between sessions.

“It just got a bit too much. I was sitting with the exam paper in front of me, realising that I couldn’t bring myself to start,” says Kitching. “I had to get out of the room. Until then, I hadn’t realised how much the stress had got to me.”

Kitching’s headmaster, Paul Strong, believes that government attempts to get sixth-formers to study a broader curriculum are backfiring.

“I have seen one of my brightest pupils run in tears from the room where she was taking her AS levels,” he says. “No wonder: she took five exams within six hours — and finally cracked. It is a ridiculous and unacceptable situation.”

Some of the names in this article have been changed

Times recommends

• Students to rate lecturers online
• Students face big rise in university fees
• Queen’s English Society boss’s poor spelling